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Royal Mail And Snouts In The Trough.

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mikey4444 | 08:58 Tue 25th Mar 2014 | News
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It hasn't taken Royal Mail long to get their Managers noses in the trough it would seem ::

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/aug/02/royal-mail-boss-moya-greene-pay-bonus
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That article was from August 2013 though Mikey- and the pay referred to related to 12 months before that- so surely well before the date of privatisation.
I agree though that these boards and remuneration committees are effectively a club. It's up to shareholders now though to approve the remuneration. If there's any consolation a big chunk (45%) should go to the Treasury in tax.
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I posted wrong link in error FF. This was in yesterday's Guardian :::

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/mar/23/royal-mail-chief-pay-rise-vince-cable

and this on the BBC News website ::

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-26728116

Well, they have to find the huge pay for the Chairwoman from somewhere I suppose !
Yes, they aer firing managers mickey.

Hmm, that post has backfired a bit, oh the benefit of hindesight ;-)
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Not at all ! Managers need employment, as well as Posties. But does The Big Manager need £1.5m a year, plus another £250,000 ?
Nice of you to stick up for management mikey. I think Royal mail is trimming unnecessary middle management chaff. They need to compete and at the moment they are trying to rid themeselves of a public sector mentality. For example I regularly sell on Ebay and I use MyHermes because they are much cheaper and they collect and deliver door to door. RM must compete in a brutal market place. I think they are doing the right thing, middle management is often a huge unnecessary swathe of uselessness, especially in the public sector (see NHS), so now RM are in the real world they have to deal with the realities of surviving in the private sector.
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But why would this woman need £1.5m and a further quarter of a million extra ? Why can't she exist on a 3& payrise ? After all, her 3% is a whole lot more than any of her staff's 3%.
half decent CEOs cost money mikey. You may as well ask why top footballers are on what they are.
Yes, many premiership footballers earn 5 times as much. I don't see why they need the money but it's all relative and people always want to maximise their earnings so I can't see how we can change things. At least the tax system claws almost half of it back
Never thought I'd see you rush to the side of Management Mickey, but TTT has hit the nail square on the head. all public sector bodies suffer from bloated management which then go on to created their own little empires and bloat even further. As I said yesterday and TTT has also pointed out the NHS is a prime example of this.

As for the salary of the CEO, if you were running a business would you hire someone who would do a good job or someone who is cheap but next to useless? If she fails she will walk, much faster than a public sector manager so the job is much tougher. Doesn't seem an excessive fee to me if she sorts it out.

Nice to see a woman in the post and paid well too.
Not a particularly good comparison, comparing footballers to CEOs. For a start, when you talk about multimillion pound salaries for footballers, you only tend to be talking about those footballers playing for the championship/premiership clubs, and any salary comparison ought to be made with TV entertainers, since it is TV money that has fuelled the surge in their salaries. And much of the salary tends to be performance related, much more so than any CEO.

More interestingly, CEO pay has outstripped your average workers pay over the last 3 decades - In the US, CEO pay has risen 725% pm average between the late 70s and now,whilst average pay for employees has risen only around 10% during the same period. We now have ridiculously large and indefensible pay gaps between CEOs and their corporate employee average salary, with CEOs on average earning 200 times more than the average wage at their company, compared to just 30 times more back in the 1980s.

And CEOs have certainly not got that much better at doing their job, at a time when your average employee probably has to do more in their daily job than they ever did with technology -enabling changes and staff layoffs.

CEO and board salary at the major corporations is determined by them, with input from salary analysis firms that always offer comparison with the upper quartile of "similar" companies, ensuring the pay is on an ever upward spiral - and individual shareholders have very little say or power in the salary awards, although that is changing a little bit recently.

Yes, a visionary CEO is worth good money - but for many of them, a salary average 200 or more times the average wage of their corporate employees is difficult to justify, especially when some of the bonus schemes seem designed to shovel additional money into their pockets rather than be a true measure of outstanding performance or exceeding demanding targets.
The footballer example was just to show that all jobs have a price based on supply and demand, taking account of affordability, and also that it's not just CEOs who want to maximise their earnings, even when they already far exceed what they need to live a high life.
I think there is a culture of a club among bosses and remuneration committees and I don't think most are worth the money, but i don't see what we can do to stop it happening.- how can you interfere on pay or set maximum salaries? The tax system at least helps ensure a large chunk goes to teh Treasury
i agree with LG. 'boardroom' pay has spiralled past any reasonable comparison with workers pay. and it hasnt slowed down since the downturn, either.
remuneration commities are a joke, imo.
It's hard to disagree, svejk- but is there something we can do other than sit back and rake in the tax revenue?(The top 1-2% of earners pay something like 30% of the UK's income tax receipts.)
Well you cannot impose Government controls on CEO pay, I agree. But some measure could be adopted that might aid the shareholders in making more of an informed decision about Board/CEO remuneration. Government could make it mandatory for companies to publish the CEO/Average corporate worker multiple,for a start.And secondly, salary remuneration should always be put up to the shareholders to vote on, with a clear delineation on what the bonus payments and targets are going to be, and that vote needs to be seperate from the vote on proposed corporate actions in the upcoming year, which is not always the case at the moment.

Shareholder Activism, basically ;)
I think that happens, LG. When i get the chance to vote I nearly always vote against the remuneration and against the choice of auditors but I assume the major shareholders have the power to vote these things through
well, i could spell committees right for a start.;) no answers, ff,just a little rant. shareholder power? dont those controlling 'it' have a vested interest in high salaries.
Not many companies that I am aware of alllow for separate vote on senior executive remuneration; All to often it is tied into the vote for the upcoming board agreed action plan.

Other government mandated changes that could be adopted would be to have a representative from the workforce on the board - the co-determination model favoured in Germany, for instance.

And not many if any of the large corporates offer an analysis of senior executive pay as a comparison against average worker remuneration. Indeed, the US are trying to introduce this at the moment, to much opposition from big business.

If CEOs are really worth their money, then they should have absolutely no objection to that kind of transparency, and should positively welcome the opportunity to justify their salary to shareholders and commentators and employees alike.
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There is something we can do FF...take Royal Mail back into public ownership. I predicted that this sort of thing would happen once it had been privatised. It always does when a utility is privatised. I don't expect the right-wingers on here to agree with me though ! First the cost of using the service would rocket, then snouts would start wallowing in the trough. The last part is the loss of the universal service, which will come eventually.
Let's look at the other half of the communications empire - telecoms.

Before BT was privatised and when the organisation was "Post Office Telecommunications" they had a workforce of around 240,000 people. There was one phone you could have (black) and if you were lucky you could get one installed in about eight weeks (if there was no waiting list in your area). Even then you might have to have a shared "party line" if there were no lines available to your street.

Move on 30 years and the industry is unrecogniseable from its former self. BT now employs a little over 100,000 staff and you can get a phone in a day or two (or if not you can get one from another supplier). Large numbers of middle managers were culled (though not one compulsory redundancy was imposed). The CEO of BT last year earned around £1.5m plus sundries (and has since been elevated to the House of Lords) and this is not unreasonable for a company that turns over around £15bn and has an investment programme running to about £2-£3bn annually.

Where would you rather be and what makes you think Royal Mail will suffer a different fate?

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