Today is Fat Cat Wednesday.
According to analysis by the Resolution Foundation, High Pay Centre and others, the typical chief executive of the biggest 100 companies in the UK will have grabbed the typical annual wage of a full-time worker by 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday 6th of January 2021.
Put another way, it will have taken just 34 hours for the top dogs in the FTSE 100 companies to earn the equivalent of an entire year's wage for the typical UK worker.
But we should spare a kindly thought for these poor buggers, because last year they only had to put in 33 hours work for full year's pay!
The median (or middle income) of a full-time worker was £30,353 as of June 2019 – the High Pay Centre's last available figures - but the median Chief Executives’ income is 120 times that much.
If we switch to the median wage for all workers, full-time and part-time, Company bosses earn 145 times as much.
And taking the average (mean) income of CEOs - which was £4.7million back in June 2019 - then the average worker would have to toil for 154 years to match these parasites’ annual income.
CASES OF CAPITALIST GREED
There are many, many obscene examples of individual greed and privilege amidst the suffering and insecurity faced by millions of workers, particularly during the pandemic.
The highest paid chief executive is Tim Steiner of Ocado on £58.73million. It would take the average full-time worker 8 years to earn as much as he got in one, single day!
As hospitality workers - already low paid - face carnage to their jobs, Whitbread’s CEO, Alison Brittain, got a pay package of £5.59million.
As millions of us yearn for an effective vaccine against the killer COVID-19, AstraZeneca are poised to make gargantuan profits. Even before this new, bountiful source of wealth for Big Pharma, Pascal Soriot of AstraZeneca raked in £14.33 million, which is 200 times as much as the average worker.
To rub salt in the wound, only 40 of the FTSE 100 companies bother to pay the mis-named Living Wage of £9.30-an-hour to their workers.
And some super-profitable giants, including TESCO, have been recently named and shamed for not even paying the pathetic government minimum wage!
FOR A LEGAL MAXIMUM INCOME
This grotesque new batch of statistics underlines the arguments that I and the Scottish Socialist Party have put forward in favour of a Legal Maximum Income, initially set at a 10:1 differential with the legal minimum wage.
That’s been the policy of the SSP for most of our existence since 1998.
And at the 2018 annual conference of my own union, USDAW, I successfully argued the case for this policy against the opposition of the central National officials, winning a clear conference majority for a legally-enforced Maximum Income, initially set at 10 times the legal minimum wage.
[Watch the short video BELOW]
Personally, I’ve always thought a 10:1 differential between the maximum income and the minimum wage far too generous.
But the modesty of this demand is its great merit; who in Hell could oppose such a modest measure against the systemic and growing inequality in capitalist Scotland and capitalist Britain?
Instead of the 145:1, 120:1, and 200:1 figures explained above, 10:1 would be a revolutionary advance, as a major source of revenue for better wages and vastly improved public services.
As we demand a legally enforced £12-an-hour minimum wage for all at 16, who on Earth could conjure up a case against a ceiling of £120-an-hour as the maximum income allowed?
And I believe it is important to describe this policy as a maximum income rather than just a maximum wage. Why? Because, for example, chief executives' fixed salaries typically only account for 20% of their total annual income, whereas long-term and short-term incentive schemes account for 75% of their ill-gotten incomes.
WE DEMAND THE BAKERY, NOT JUST A BIGGER SLICE OF THE CAKE!
Indeed, this point is a reminder that whilst socialists and trade unionists should take up the demand for a Legal Maximum Income with ferocious enthusiasm, we will only ever entirely eliminate wealth inequality by challenging the private ownership of the means of producing that wealth; the private accumulation of profits, perks and privileges for the few.
Capitalism by its very nature is a system where the millions make the wealth and the millionaires take the wealth.
Democratic public ownership of all the big companies which dominate the means of production, distribution and exchange is the foundation for an egalitarian society where the vast majority of the population - the working class – gain back the fruits of their labour in the form of wages and the social wage, such as universal provision of services like health, education, housing and transport.
On Fat Cat Wednesday, renew and redouble your determination to combat the obscene poverty and inequality which scars the face of Scotland by demanding immediate measures like a £12 minimum wage and a maximum income initially set at 10 times that.
Join that fight alongside the struggle for the collective ownership of the natural, industrial and financial wealth that could eliminate poverty overnight, if taken out of the hands of the capitalists, bankers and landowners who rob the rest of us, through the organised exploitation that is capitalism.
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