I heard Sir Michael Lyons on the World at One today telling listeners that BBC Director General Mark Thompson is having his £834,000 salary frozen for 3 years. Poor man, doesn't your heart just bleed for him?
It also came out the Mark Thompson earns 60 times the salary of a junior Grade 2 employee working outside London who'd be on around £14,000.
Once again it makes you wonder about the sensitivity of people in 'high office'. I mean how can Sir Michael Lyons believe that this news about Mark Thompson will elicit sympathy? Or was in any way a good example to justify how tough the BBC is being with its employees.
And how does Adam Crozier sleep at night knowing that he earns £3million a year while his posties - the ones who do the real hard graft - are on so much more lowly wages.
And I feel the same really about MP's spouses who are now creating about the fact they may be banned from working for them in future. If it's true that they've been on £30,000 a year, how come? The average pay for most secretaries is surely much more likely to be around £18,000 so how come MP's partners are entitled to so much more?
What really bothers me is the lack of sensitivity, the lack of empathy. People on huge salaries never seem to stop and think how they come across to the rest of us. They don't seem to feel embarrassed at all. Do you really think someone can believe he is worth £3 million? Particularly when he seems to be so spectacularly bad at people management....?
One can only imagine that their general attitude is that they think they're worth these big salaries; that they think they're somehow special.
I wonder if the thought never occurrs to them that gross inequality matters, that it sends a bad signal to staff and society in general, that it can contribute to bad staff relations and divisions in society?
Showing posts with label Bonus Culture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bonus Culture. Show all posts
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Friday, October 16, 2009
Goldman Sachs Bonus Culture and MP's Expenses........still they don't 'get it'
How are we ever to address our broken society until those in power, and well-paid jobs , learn how it must feel to be totally powerless and poor, or unemployed.
I know we don’t learn empathy in school......but i would surely help if we did? If only our MP’s could understand that most of us, let alone those on benefits, would give anything to be able to afford cleaners and gardeners. And that the idea of having these services paid for by somebody else (ie the tax-payer) sounds really too good to be true. After all, most of us manage to do our own cleaning and gardening. And we fit it in around our full-time jobs....so why are MP’s so different, many might ask.
And this is the point, surely, that MP’s (or many of them at least ) seem to have become detached from the rest of society. They’ve been gradually seduced by their ‘allowances’ into feeling entitled to a grander life-style, with better pay and more luxuries than the rest of us. And this is surely why we’re finding it hard to forgive them for transgressions or understand their current petty grievances.
And something similar seems to have been going on with the bankers who have gradually grown so accustomed to their own extravagant expectations, that they’re jumping back on the bonus gravy train at the earliest possible moment, even though it seems indecently early to the rest of us.
If only they too could put themselves in other peoples’ shoes.....not the shoes of the poorest, necessarily, just the shoes of the everyday working man and woman whose average salary is around £24,000. These people, the majority after all, can only dream of having half a million pounds and probably never will even if they slog their guts out for a lifetime. The idea that some fat cats who happen to work in the financial sector can expect such hand-outs once a year purely for doing their jobs is what sticks in the gullet. I can’t help wondering how we’ve got to the stage that some people feel this is their entitlement. How did banking salaries and bonuses become so out of skew with the rest of us?
And what do these people who are in receipt of such huge amounts of money think about the rest of us who aren’t? Do they ever stop and give a thought to how they’re reinforcing a great divide in society? How what they feel to be ‘appropriate’ rewards feel like greed to the rest of us?
Don’t you just wish that for once, a banker would speak out and express some guilt or at least humility? That one of them would acknowledge publicly that such rewards probably contribute to resentment amongst those less fortunate....and how damaging that can be? How refreshing would that be?
And the same goes for MP’s. Wouldn’t it be refreshing if one of them really spoke the truth for a change and acknowledged that they’ve become far too easily accustomed to a lifestyle which is way out of sight for most of their constituents. And that anyone who’s so out of touch can hardly be expected to know how to govern in the interests of the majority.
Then we might begin to feel they ‘get it’.
I know we don’t learn empathy in school......but i would surely help if we did? If only our MP’s could understand that most of us, let alone those on benefits, would give anything to be able to afford cleaners and gardeners. And that the idea of having these services paid for by somebody else (ie the tax-payer) sounds really too good to be true. After all, most of us manage to do our own cleaning and gardening. And we fit it in around our full-time jobs....so why are MP’s so different, many might ask.
And this is the point, surely, that MP’s (or many of them at least ) seem to have become detached from the rest of society. They’ve been gradually seduced by their ‘allowances’ into feeling entitled to a grander life-style, with better pay and more luxuries than the rest of us. And this is surely why we’re finding it hard to forgive them for transgressions or understand their current petty grievances.
And something similar seems to have been going on with the bankers who have gradually grown so accustomed to their own extravagant expectations, that they’re jumping back on the bonus gravy train at the earliest possible moment, even though it seems indecently early to the rest of us.
If only they too could put themselves in other peoples’ shoes.....not the shoes of the poorest, necessarily, just the shoes of the everyday working man and woman whose average salary is around £24,000. These people, the majority after all, can only dream of having half a million pounds and probably never will even if they slog their guts out for a lifetime. The idea that some fat cats who happen to work in the financial sector can expect such hand-outs once a year purely for doing their jobs is what sticks in the gullet. I can’t help wondering how we’ve got to the stage that some people feel this is their entitlement. How did banking salaries and bonuses become so out of skew with the rest of us?
And what do these people who are in receipt of such huge amounts of money think about the rest of us who aren’t? Do they ever stop and give a thought to how they’re reinforcing a great divide in society? How what they feel to be ‘appropriate’ rewards feel like greed to the rest of us?
Don’t you just wish that for once, a banker would speak out and express some guilt or at least humility? That one of them would acknowledge publicly that such rewards probably contribute to resentment amongst those less fortunate....and how damaging that can be? How refreshing would that be?
And the same goes for MP’s. Wouldn’t it be refreshing if one of them really spoke the truth for a change and acknowledged that they’ve become far too easily accustomed to a lifestyle which is way out of sight for most of their constituents. And that anyone who’s so out of touch can hardly be expected to know how to govern in the interests of the majority.
Then we might begin to feel they ‘get it’.
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