Plenty of dough
I’M sure you were just as surprised as I was with the latest report from the ACSI.
I mean, who would have guessed that while most people’s wages have been stagnant for almost a decade some in the workforce have enjoyed biblical increases in their remuneration.
Yes our revered and obviously well performing Chief Executive Officers. The latest survey by the Australian Council of Superannuation Investors found that financial year 2017 was a bumper one for chief executives.
Median pay for the CEO’s running Australia’s top 100 companies was $4.6 million courtesy of a very generous 12.4 per cent increase over the previous year.
If you fall into the bracket of an average worker like most of us, you will have been lucky to get an increase that matched even inflation.
ACSI’s boss Louise Davidson at least had the good grace to offer these thoughts which I would have thought are pretty much in line with how many think: “At a time when public trust in business is at a low ebb and wages growth is weak, board decisions to pay large bonuses just for hitting budget targets, rather than exceptional performance, are especially tone-deaf. This may be a sign that boards have lost sight of the link between a company’s social licence and the expectations of communities and investors.”
Don’t you just love the implication that companies operate under a social licence and that it actually may have some meaning?
A social licence to operate is a concept that refers to the level of acceptance or approval by local communities and stakeholders of organisations and their operations. This original meaning has evolved recently into the notions of “corporate social responsibility” and “social acceptability”.
Given that we’ve just been through the Royal Banking Commission, which essentially confirmed what we all knew any way, that businesses lie, cheat, obfuscate and display all the moral principles of a randy alley cat. Social licence? Give me a break.
So this year’s winner in the “I must be the best CEO in Australia” goes to — insert huge drum roll and the applause of the average worker — Don Meij, boss of pizza chain Domino’s Pizza Group with a staggering $36.8 million last year. So Don is so good at his job that he earns more in one year than Joe Blow earns in 668 years? What a guy. Now I have nothing against Domino’s pizzas but lets be realistic, this is a company that sells essentially, rubbish food to the people that should least eat it. In this process of contributing to the obesity crisis the company also employs vast numbers of low paid casual and hence insecure workers.
Now it’s probably unfair to single out Don from Domino’s as even the lowest paid CEO in the top 10 gets more than $10 million per year. Interestingly three health care providers make it into the top 10 as well which may ex- plain why health costs outstrip inflation every single year. However the median pay for an ASX100 CEO was $4.36 million, 79 times the median wage. That was up 12.4 per cent on last year. The median pay for CEOs of the next 100 biggest companies, meanwhile, was $1.76 million, or 32 times the median wage. That was an increase of 22.1 per cent. I should point out at this stage that I actually have no particular problem that some people earn enormous sums of money and get paid huge bonuses although, surely bonuses are just an extra reward for doing the job you’re being paid for? No, high pay is not the problem. The problem is inequality and no I don’t want everyone to get paid millions or any quasi socialist nonsense like that. But there has to be some sort of equity and I can’t accept that business leaders and politicians can achieve increases well above inflation yet the people who really need a pay rise, just to cope with rising costs, are left hanging.