FAT CAT FRIDAY - Demand Legal Maximum Income!

Fat Cats earn a year's average wage by Friday lunchtime

Imagine you only had to work 3 days to get the average wage of a typical full-time worker in the country. To have all that free time for other pursuits, personal development and participation in the running of workplaces, the economy and society - and still earn the current median full-time annual income of £29,574. 

But here's the critical clarification: we are not talking about a 3-day week on this annual income; that's a whole other article for another time. We mean 3 days in the entire year of 2019!

Fat Cat Friday

Last year it was dubbed Fat Cat Thursday, because the average Chief Executive of the FTSE 100 top companies could match the entire income of the average worker in the first three days of 2018. This year it was Fat Cat Friday, 4th January - not because it took these corporate fat-cats any longer to pile up a year's average worker's wage, but purely because New Years Day moved by a day. 

The latest report by the High Pay Centre has mind-blowing statistics on the nauseating inequality at the heart of capitalism. The top bosses in the biggest 100 companies in Britain - the FTSE 100 - awarded themselves an average pay package of £3.9million last year. That's £1,020 an hour! It's 133 times as much as the average full-time worker earns. 

As an earlier report (August 2018) from the same source showed, it's an annual income that workers aged 25 and more, on the government's deliberately misnamed National Living Wage, would have to work for 386 years to earn! Not a particularly realistic option, the last time I checked life expectancy figures! 

Galloping Gap in Incomes 

And contrary to the deceitful rhetoric of the Tories and their ilk, there is no trend towards greater fairness in pay, nor any tackling of the obscenity of boardroom greed by an outbreak of shareholders' democracy. Quite the opposite; the average FTSE 100 CEO had an 11% pay increase compared to the previous year - at a time when average workers' pay rises hovered around 1.7%. An annual pay package of £3.9m compared with £3.45m. 

And the gap is galloping ahead between bosses' and workers' pay. In 1998, the average FTSE 100 chief executive earned 47 times as much as the average full-time worker. In the past 12 months, it has risen from a differential of 120:1 up to 133:1. Overall, the gap has tripled in the last 20 years, with no sign of slowing up or narrowing. After all, it's the Remuneration Committees of these top companies - made up of chief executives and directors of other companies! - which decide the pay packages.

Talk about nepotism and corruption! It's built into the very DNA of capitalism. 

That's why these overlords of capitalist exploitation could've clocked off at 1pm on Friday 4th January and still go home with the £29,574 it will take the average full-time worker the whole of the year to earn - if the latter still has a job! 

Morally Repugnant - Economically Destructive 

Not only is this pay inequality obscene, but there is no justification for it whatsoever, and it doesn't even make economic sense. 

Capitalist apologists often trot out claims that such salaries are a just reward for 'the risk takers' at the top of corporations. What risks? 

They hire and fire workers educated by the state, kept well by the NHS, and trained with the aid of lavish state handouts to companies. The same companies grab massive state aid for research and development. They rely on state-funded transport and communications networks to do their daily business, to amass their private profits with the aid of public subsidies. And then, in pursuit of even higher profit margins, these capitalist giants operate in the full knowledge that their pitiful pay rates for the workers who actually produce their company wealth will be topped up by the likes of Working Tax Credits - state subsidies to low-paying capitalists, funded by workers' taxes. 

Nor does it make the economy healthier. When a worker gains a modest pay rise, just about every penny extra is spent - on daily necessities, and in local shops, cafes, pubs, etc. This helps create or secure other workers' jobs. 

In contrast, the bloated rich gamble on the stock markets to make even more money, or invest in useless luxuries like yachts, private jets, and works of art that are often salted away in bank vaults for 'safety', never to be seen nor appreciated by their owners, let alone wider society. 

Capitalist Hoarders 

Their habits of hoarding - further illustrated by record low levels of industrial investment from profits - actually adds to job insecurity. The jobs holocaust in retail recently - with forecasts of 160,000 further job losses in 2019 - is in substantial part the result of low pay for millions, who therefore struggle to spend... a system of low pay designed to fund the profits and privileges of capitalist owners and their disgustingly over-paid chief executives and directors. 

Demand Action for Legal Maximum Income 

It's not sufficient to expose and condemn this stinking income inequality. We need action based on concrete alternatives. 

It's not sufficient for the TUC to criticize chief executives for "taking out more than they put in", to quote Frances O'Grady. It's necessary for the trade union and socialist movement to tackle this head on with the demand for a legally-enforced Maximum Income, tied to a legally-enforced national minimum wage. 

For years, the Scottish Socialist Party has advocated a maximum income based on ten times the minimum wage. Since its Annual Delegate Meeting last April, that's the policy of my own union, Usdaw, with its 430,000 members. 

As I said at the Usdaw conference, in successfully proposing this policy of a Legal Maximum Income initially set at 10 times the national minimum wage:

"Of course, there will be screams of hell and damnation from on high.  Let them scream blue murder as long as they want. When did that ever stop the trade union movement from fighting for what is right? 

"I think this is an extremely moderate and modest demand. I could put the case for 4:1 or 5:1 but I am going to be moderate, let's start with 10:1 as a measure to cut the inequality...

"If we assume a 35-hour week, a policy I strongly and passionately advocate, a 10:1 differential on the policy of the union for a £10 minimum wage will be £100-an-hour. That's £3,500 a week. It is £182,000 a year. Who in hell could object to being limited to that as an income? Who could argue that it is a disincentive to do a job, however skilled it may be, if you only get £182,000? By the way, it doesn't even affect a full 1% of the population. The infamous 1% are those on roughly £150,000 or more. This is setting the ceiling on £182,000 a year. 

"We cannot sit back and wait for social justice off the Tories. We cannot sit back and wait for a social conscience to erupt in the boardrooms of big business. We need to argue the case as a union, amongst our own members, inside the TUC, inside the Labour Party, (we are already convinced in the Scottish Socialist Party!), convince people of this policy, to then go forward and get it adopted and implemented." 

[quoted from Usdaw verbatim Report of ADM 2018]

HES workers left reliant on Salvation Army and food-banks

Two Planets on Earth 

Fat Cat Friday coincided with yet more inflation-busting train fare increases; 160 workers at Health Environmental Services in Shotts being forced to turn to Salvation Army charity and food banks for survival after being made redundant, but without any redundancy payments, and still owed their December wages; child poverty levels rocketing at their fastest rate in 30 years; and one in every 200 people being identified as either homeless or in totally inadequate housing. 

Two planets here on Earth! If these contrasting fortunes of the capitalist exploiters and the working class don't make your blood boil in anger, I'd recommend medical attention.

We need to use this obscene start to the New Year to redouble our resolve in battling against poverty and inequality. To popularise the demand for a Legal Maximum Income initially set at 10 times the national minimum wage, as the inseparable companion to the campaign for an immediate £10-an-hour national minimum wage for all over 16, without exception. 

Organise! 

As I said in the same speech at Usdaw conference last April:

"I do not claim that our proposition solves everything. Speaking as a socialist trade unionist, I believe democratic public ownership of the commanding heights of the economy and the biggest businesses is part of the solution. I do not just want to see a limitation on the slice of the cake that the tops of industry get. I want us collectively to own the whole bloody bakery! 

However, this proposition goes one hell of a way towards tackling the inequality. It is a radical departure from the morally repugnant and economically destructive inequality that is increasing at the minute." 

Take up the fight for a minimum of £10-an-hour now, immediately, and a maximum income of £100-an-hour - in your unions, on the streets. Help make advances in 2019 towards equality and socialism in our lifetimes. Demand not only a fairer share of the cake, but collective ownership of the bakery! 

CLOSE THE OBSCENE GAP: for a £10 minimum and a maximum wage

The gaping chasm between the incomes of millions of workers and handfuls of millionaire company chief executives is opening up ever wider, like the blades of a giant pair of scissors.

The case I expounded in my book, Break the Chains, for an immediate national minimum wage of £10-an-hour for all workers - regardless of age - and a maximum wage initially based on an overly generous 10:1 differential with the minimum (i.e. £100-an-hour maximum) screams out from every page of every recent report on workers' wages and bosses' incomes. 

The top dogs of the FTSE 100 biggest companies have just had yet another 10% pay rise - and that's before they rake in untold bonuses, shares portfolios, and bottomless pension pots. Since the 2010 recession, these capitalist overlords have had their salaries increase by a third! They now wallow like pigs in the proverbial, on average incomes of £5.5million!

Back on Planet Earth!

Meantime in the same country, but on a different planet, UK workers' wages have plunged by 10.4% in the same five years since the 2010 recession. As the Bank of England expressed it, most families have suffered "a lost decade of income". Mass unemployment has been replaced by mass poverty pay.

Again, as I spelt out in Break the Chains:

"Poverty pay impoverishes not only its direct victims - the growing horde of workers denied access to society on a par with their neighbours and contemporaries - but also impoverishes the whole of society. The lack of spending power that low wages curses affected families with, in turn depresses the wider economy."

That's one of the reasons even the Tories - those privileged mouthpieces for the moneyed class of parasites - felt obliged to superficially increase wages in April, through their obscenely mis-named £7.20 National Living Wage. 

Of course they also sought to divide workers, by excluding the under-25s, who are increasingly hired in preference to 'older', more expensive workers in the likes of retail and hospitality. 

And the other factor that drove the obnoxious George Osborne to do this was the fear of his class at a pay revolt, as workers become increasingly infuriated at the obscene contrast between their grinding poverty and capitalist chiefs' shameless opulence. 

Capitalism has no Solutions 

Poverty pay wrecks lives. It wrecks the economy. It shreds social solidarity. And its accompanying inequality demotivates millions of workers who observe company bosses on 183 times as much as 'their' workers' average wage. 

But that's where the lunacy of capitalism prevents a solution that would keep the rich in the wealth they're accustomed to, whilst paying the wealth-creating working class decent wages that boosts spending power. 

It's alright for Theresa May - or Cameron before her - to spout platitudes about "the irrational, unhealthy and growing gap", but what will they do about it? They promised to 'aim' at the National Living Wage (only for those past their 25th) reaching £9 by 2020. That's pathetic, totally inadequate here and now, let alone four years hence. But it's also provoked uproar amongst business sections, who scream blue murder about "having to make difficult choices". 

Employers in hospitality, the care sector and nurseries recently joined with the Federation of Small Businesses, Association of Convenience Stores and National Farmers Union in a letter to the new Tory Business Minister demanding he abandon such giddy extravagance as £9-an-hour for the over-25s in 2020.

Profit versus Pay

So here's the rub: it's to the advantage of the capitalist class as a whole to have reasonably paid workers who can therefore spend more and thereby boost overall profits for the ruling capitalist class. But in the jungle warfare of capitalism as a system, with each profiteering outfit vying with its competitors, every penny pay increase is a penny lost to their individual company profits. 

As I put it in the book: 

"David Cameron telling a room of capitalist bosses that 'Britain needs a pay rise' is like Dracula appealing to a conference of vampires for volunteers to donate blood. These bloodsuckers have moved mountains for the past 30-40 years to slash the real wages of workers, boosting their profits by driving down the share of wealth that goes to wages."

Organise For £10 Now and a Maximum Wage 

We clearly can't rely on the benevolence - nor even the naked self-interest - of either the capitalist employers or their political representatives to tackle poverty pay nor the opening scissors of inequality. That requires an entirely different approach: workers becoming conscious of how they're exploited by this system, confident of their own power to challenge that set-up when organised.

And a struggle for the likes of a guaranteed minimum wage of £10 now, in 2016 - alongside a legally enforced £100-an-hour maximum income - as the first, modest steps towards the eradication of poverty, inequality and all the social ills they create.  

RECOVERY: WHAT RECOVERY?

If you believe George Osborne, David Cameron and a chunk of the media, workers are back in the land of milk and honey. We're told our wages are exceeding inflation for the first time since before the 2008 recession. Reality is a bit less rosy for those working to remain poor.

Real wages plummeted by £50 a week in 2014. For the first time since the 1920s, real wages are lower at the end of a government's term of rule than when they seized office.

And a special report by Ernst Young ITEM Club last month punctured the Tories' celebratory balloons. Their chief economist, Martin Beck, wrote:

"Real wages have fallen by nearly 10% since 2008, but workers will finally see more money in their pockets this year. However, this is not a normal recovery. The move towards later retirement and huge increase in the workforce has depressed real wages as workers have priced themselves into jobs. We don't expect a return to boomtime wages any time soon."

ZERO HOURS BOOM

Try telling the 200,000 Scottish workers consigned to the pitiful pay and hellish uncertainty of life on Zero Hours Contracts that things are getting better!

In any case, any workers aspiring to be as well off as they were before 2008 severely lack ambition! This was already one of the most unequal states internationally, with some of the lowest pay, longest hours of work and shortest holidays in Europe.

The SSP campaign against dreadful Zero-hours contracts.

THE BRIBES DON'T WORK

But just in case we're not all convinced to rush off to vote Tory by their claims of rising wages, the Tories hope to bribe the gullible as the general election looms. Osborne's plans have leaked out: to raise the tax threshold "towards £11,000", with bogus boasts that this will rescue the lowest paid. In fact it wouldn't even touch many of the poorest people, because they're paying no taxes right now, due to earning below the existing £10,000 tax threshold.

That includes vast armies of part-time workers, women in particular. It includes hundreds of thousands in retail jobs, the biggest single employer in the country, and also the biggest single sector of poverty pay.

Nor will this minor tax threshold adjustment compensate public sector workers for the increased pension contributions they face next month - so they can work longer and get less in their pensions, if they aren't forced to work 'til they drop.

Very few will be fooled by the Tories' claims. Workers know full well that when VAT, Council Tax and other regressive taxes are added, the poorest 10% of the population pay 43% of their lowly incomes in taxes - whereas the richest 10% only pay 35% of the incomes they grudgingly declare! And of course they systematically dodge tax on an industrial scale, as the recent HSBC scandal confirmed.

SETTING THEIR PALS' PAY

Anger at the way wages make up a shrinking slice of the national cake of wealth is turned into justified rage when you look at the incomes of the giant employers - and of those who decide the salaries of their chief executives.

A recent survey of the incomes and directorships held by what's called the Remuneration Committees of the FTSE 100 top companies makes dangerous reading for anyone with high blood pressure! These bodies decide the pay of company executives. They consist of a narrow pool of directors of other companies, a cosseted elite who might as well be from another planet. The survey found that the average income of the members of these Remuneration Committees was £441,383 last year, 16 times the average worker's wage of £27,200. And the highest paid member of this self-serving clique of capitalists was awarded over £9.2million - an incredible 339 times as much as the average worker's wage for 2014.

OVERPAID LOW PAY COMMISSION

In stark contrast, workers eking out an existence on poverty pay have their very own 'Remuneration Committee' - the Low Pay Commission, which annually recommends what levels of national minimum wage the government should introduce. Their latest report shamelessly boasts of 'inflation-busting increases' for the minimum wage, claiming 'the highest increase since 2007' - because they've recommended a 3% rise on the over-21s rate...wait for it...to the princely sum of £6.70 an hour!

In case such 'inflated' pay might bust the allegedly booming economy, these worthies have proposed £5.30 for workers aged 18-20, £3.87 for 16-17-year-olds, and a slave rate of £2.80 for apprentices.

This Low Pay Commission has one distinct feature: none of its nine members has even the remotest idea what it's like to live on low pay! It's made up of employers, 'independents' and those allegedly from an 'employee background'. One of the two claiming the latter role is John Hannett, general secretary of Usdaw, the biggest union in the retail sector, with 45,000 members in Scotland alone.

STAND UP FOR WORKERS!

But those of us who are Usdaw members, working in retail on £6.50-£7.20 an hour in various firms, don't seem to be our general secretary John Hannett's first consideration; he and the UK leadership of Usdaw actually submitted a proposal to the Low Pay Commission for a £7 minimum wage from next October!

As reported in the Usdaw union magazine, our general secretary isn't on £6.50 an hour, nor even the £10 an hour he voted for at the TUC conference; he's on a salary of £94,514, plus NIC and pension contributions, plus a union car - in-work benefits totaling another £42,408! No wonder he's not storming heaven to mobilize workers in retail and other low-paid jobs to demand a decent living wage.

LOW PAID 'COMMISSION'

Far from feeling that all is glorious and comfortable for millions of workers, people are not seeing the benefits of the much trumpeted recovery in the economy, are struggling to cope with the household bills - and desperately need to become part of a massive campaign for a living minimum wage. We need our own, genuine, 'low pay commission', a force made up of the low paid and their allies, organized and determined to demand decent wages.

The SSP is determined to be at the heart of such a struggle, and are proud to have common cause with the Bakers union (BFAWU) and others battling for £10 now for all workers. We appeal to the leaderships of all trades unions to take up the cudgels in pursuit of the £10 minimum wage which every one of them voted for at the 2014 annual conference of the 7-million member TUC. And we appeal to workers to join us in the fight for union rights in every workplace - as part of the struggle to banish poverty pay, Zero Hours Contracts and the disgusting inequality created by capitalist profiteering.

FAT CAT TUESDAY: who says £10 an hour is unrealistic?

Next time somebody says that the SSP's campaign for a £10 an hour national minimum wage is unrealistic, or would damage the economy, spare a thought for the bosses who dictate the poverty pay that workers struggle to survive on.

Last year we had 'Fat Cat Wednesday'. This year it came a day earlier; Fat Cat Tuesday, 6th January 2015, was the day by which the average chief executive of the FTSE 100 companies raked in as much as the average worker will earn over the entire year!

By late afternoon on their second day back at work, the average chief executive of each of the FTSE 100 firms had already piled up £27,200 in earnings, which was the average annual wage of a worker in the UK in 2014. 

£1200 an hour!

Even if we make the naively generous assumptions that these bloated bosses work a 12-hour day, only take 10 days' annual leave, and work 3 out of 4 weekends (none of which assumptions we have any evidence for!), that still means they are on £1,200 an hour! Their annual average income for 2014 was £4.72million - each!

Whereas the average worker's wage 'rose' from £27,000 in 2013 to £27,200 last year, the FTSE 100 chiefs awarded themselves an increase of £500,000 each!

354 years' work to match Primark boss

Let's break down this obscenity of inequality a bit, to master the mind-boggling figures involved. 

If you did some of your shopping in Primark before Xmas, you helped boost the profits of its parent company, Associated British Foods. That outfit's top dog, George Weston, was awarded a £5m Xmas bonus for meeting targets, on top of his £1m salary and £900,000 annual bonus. Yet Primark refuses to pay its workers the Living Wage. 

Those cold figures mean that if you are earning the average national wage of £27,200, it will take you 195 years to earn the same as Primark's George Weston. And more to the point, given the wages this outfit grudgingly pays its workers, if you are a full-time worker on the £6.50 national minimum wage, it would take you 354 years to match his income!

Easyjet - easy money

To use just one other example, if you were lucky enough to use Easyjet at Xmas, you will have helped boost the income of its chief executive, Carolyn McCall. If you are fortunate enough to get the average worker's wage it will take you a modest 283 years to match her annual income. But if you are on the 'economy class' legal minimum wage, you'd need to stretch it out to 592 years of work!

These gaping chasms of income are perverse. And don't be fooled into thinking they are the exception, restricted to just the top 100 Fat Cats.

Whilst workers' wages have plummeted by £50 a week on average since 2010, the pay of ALL company directors rocketed by 21 per cent in 2014 alone.

Just 2,600 senior bankers in London grabbed an average of £1.3m each last year. That means just 2,600 wreckers of the economy had a combined income substantially greater than the entire block grant from Westminster to the Scottish government - which of course was cut, because "we have to balance the books", and "we are all in it together"!

TUC: fight for £10 now!

It's time to challenge this rotten system, stinking with corruption, rooted in the ripping off of the working class who produce the wealth in order to fill the boots of the obnoxiously rich. 

It's time the trade union movement rose up on its hind legs, mobilised workers, organised in communities, and fought to implement the policy agreed unanimously at the recent Trades Union Congress, "for a £10 per hour minimum wage for all workers".

It isn't asking the earth, in this fabulously rich country. It wouldn't mean workers on £10 an hour could wallpaper their living rooms with £50 notes! But it would transform the lives of millions, including the million people who relied on foodbanks for handouts last year - many of them in jobs.

The SSP is dedicated to fighting poverty pay. We are out to abolish the accompanying obscenity of Zero Hours Contracts. We are constantly told that the economy is recovering from the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash. Workers haven't seen a share of any such recovery. But since profits are booming, and the Fat Cats are bursting with gluttony, we are in all the stronger a position to demand a bit back from the wealth created by workers in the first place.

Right now, workers on the pathetic 'adult' minimum wage of £6.50 would have to toil for 363 years to earn as much as the average FTSE 100 Fat Cat gobbles up in a year. Not a very realistic option! 

Join the SSP and fight for £10 an hour now - for all over 16, scrapping age wage discrimination, and with equal pay for women. £10 an hour is not just modest, but entirely realistic, provided we organise and fight for it.