Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Inflation of executives’ wages the real worry
THE problem in Britain is not a shortage of money – there is plenty of it.
The prob lem is how it is distributed. We remain a very wealthy nation but that wealth is in fewer and fewer hands.
Figures from the Office for National Statistics show the richest 10% of households hold 44% of all wealth. By contrast, the poorest 50% own just 9%.
The rich are also getting richer.
The combined wealth of the 177 billionaires in the UK increased last year by £55.8billion to £653.1bn.
In the last 20 years the average pay of the chief executives of the UK’S 100 biggest companies has jumped from £1m to more than £4m. If you are a company boss there is plenty of pay but little restraint. This was not always the case.
According to the High Pay Centre, in 1979 the boss of BP was paid 16.5 times the amount of the average employee.
In 2019, the chief executive of BP earned 188 times the amount.
The boss of Barclays earned £87,323 in 1979 – 14.5 times the wage of the average employee.
By 2019, former Barclays chief Jes Staley was earning £5.9m or 140 times that of the average worker.
Workers are rightly asking why they are being told to accept a below-inflation pay increase when top managers are so lavishly rewarded.
They are also asking why the net worth of the richest people in the country has more than doubled in the last decade while workers are earning £60 a month less on average – in real terms – than in 2008.
The Government argues that pay rises will fuel inflation.
The wage inflation it should worry about is that of Britain’s
chief executives.