Well a good start would be to stop taxing the low earners so much. The careworker on £16,000, for instance, loses £3,000 of that through income tax and NICs. The amount of tax paid by low earners in the UK is an utter disgrace.

The interesting point about that table is that all those low earners would see their net salary reach the ‘should be paid’ figure if only we didn’t take the money off them in the first place.

I enjoyed the average pay column. Average pay for a UK Prime Minister is apparently £142,500; can you have an average when the sample size is one?

Puzzling that they think teachers (or at least headteachers) are grossly overpaid.

Ditto, #3 Jay, for train drivers.

Interestingly, the public’s opinion of the appropriate wage for a Premier League football player (at £365,000) is very close to the cap (£10,000 per week) imposed by Blackpool FC’s ex-chairman, Karl Oyston. Perhaps every club needs advice from a bankrupt, soon-to-be-chairman about football finances.

All the same, Richard Exell’s warning “None of this is proof of what people ‘should be paid’…” is well placed.

What I object to about high earners is the rubbish they spout about ‘hard work.’

No, they don’t work any harder than many others. It is just that what they do (so they claim) creates wealth, and that is what makes the difference in a economic system that rewards creating wealth over anything else.

The idea that a TV presenter or a weather girl earning 10 times what a nurse earns is down to hard work is a pile of dog turd.

The whole fantasy of having to pay huge wages to get the best people have been blown out of the water by the banks, and other corporate screw ups. A monkey could have done a better job than the chairman of BP.

The chairman of the board of BP is Carl-Henric Svanberg. His job is to ensure that BP operates by the rules of the company and to represent the interests of shareholders. The chairman does not get his hands dirty with operational concerns.

The chief executive of BP is Tony Hayward. For a few weeks longer. He sits at the top of a management hierarchy and his hands have become filthy in recent months.

I don’t presume to understand the causes of the Gulf of Mexico oil release. But I reckon that Hayward and colleagues were better qualified to tackle the event than outsiders.

Hayward could not even do a basic PR job which you would expect from a well paid executive.

I never presume that a chief exec or similar should be a PR person. My pension money is spread over many companies, and I am compelled to hope that my pension investors think like me: chief execs should run companies and PR people should *honestly* report their actions and choices.

For a startup, it is likely that the chief exec will be a mouthy individual who attracts attention. Established companies require the opposite. And wrt “running a company”, that means creating good products, not micro-managing workers and processes.

@8 – no matter what you might “hope”, the job of the PR team of a major corporation is simply to maximise profits (or minimise losses) in any way they can.

If honesty is ever profitable, you – and the shareholders – should expect to see it. If not (e.g. BP after the oil spill), you (and the shareholders) should expect the PR team to lie through their collective teeth. That is their purpose.

It is extremely naive to expect anything else.

The twin objectives ‘honesty’ and ‘profitability’ are rarely aligned…

The problem is people tend to have an instinctive belief that wages paid should be based on ‘ value ‘ to society, what ever that means. They would find it completely unremarkable that a good hospital consultant is paid more than a good train driver. Although a good train driver provides more utility to more people than a good consultant. Therefore, there is nothing rational about imagining that somehow wages reflect value.

The wages a certain type of job pays is not a value judgement of that type of work but is determined by the pay of similar workers in other industries. It is how much other workers are paid that will determine how much you are paid. Labour is a commodity and the price of commodities is not determined by morals but are set in an amoral market. The top nine jobs in the list all earn above the UK median wage. Therefore, if you think about wages in a moral or value sense like most of the public do, it is not surprising that a cross section of the public think those below the median are underpaid and those above are overpaid.

@9 J: I am familiar with the employment history of the current UK Prime Minister. I understand that PR flunkies tell porkies.

In the long term, telling porkies does not work. Carlton TV used to be an independent company, but is now a sub-component of ITV plc.

There is truth in your argument that “the job of the PR team of a major corporation is simply to maximise profits (or minimise losses)…”. But “in any way they can.” is hyperbole. The job of company management is to create long term share holder and consumer trust.

BP have defended their corporate position, suggesting that other companies should share the guilt for the Gulf of Mexico oil spill; they have not denied partial responsibility; they have paid immediate compensation and acknowledged that more will be required. Are these the acts of a company that cannot own up?

@11 – sorry; I wasn’t having a go at you personally (I wasn’t calling *you* naive).

Telling porkies works in the long term – if no-one detects them. Not only that, but if the future fallout from telling porkies impacts the bottom line less than telling the truth in the first place, it is a no-brainer for the PR dept.

Indeed, the PR team in this instance is legally obliged to lie in order to maximise value for shareholders. (This is not hyberbole; legal history is littered with examples.)

I have no doubt that BP shrewdly calculated the most profitable course of action and then followed it. However, the theoretical ideal may not be met in practice.

BP had no alternative but to admit *some* liability – could they really have claimed it was nothing to do with them?

Yet their PR team lied from the outset in respect of the scale of the disaster – initial estimates of 1,000 barrels per day were revised (under pressure) to 5,000, but the most accurate estimates are more than a factor of ten higher at 62,000 (initially, falling to 52,000).

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/03/us/03spill.html?_r=1&fta=y

If legal history is littered with examples could you provide a link to a relevant judgment?

“My pension money is spread over many companies, and I am compelled to hope that my pension investors think like me: chief execs should run companies and PR people should *honestly* report their actions and choices.”

That is one of the most stupid and arrogant comments I have ever read. May I suggest that you invest your pension in things other than shares. If you don’t understand that the people running the company you have invested in are responsible for the PR of that company then you know very little about corporations.

What the banks and BP have shown yet again is the folly in the belief that you have to pay huge wages at the top to insure great management. Not true. When something goes wrong you expect your highly paid executive to be able to deal with the most basic PR or get someone who can do it if you can’t.

No wonder these companies are so badly run if people like you are the owners.

I don’t presume to understand the causes of the Gulf of Mexico oil release. But I reckon that Hayward and colleagues were better qualified to tackle the event than outsiders.

What a wonderful image… Tony Hayward in overalls and a hard hat.

Personally, I reckon that the actual engineers involved in designing, specifying, and building the systems in question would be better qualified than a bunch of more-or-less interchangeable executives, but what do I know?

But then, this casual conflation of the people who manage the people who oversee the people who do the actual work with the people who do the actual work is a long-standing tradition, isn’t it?

@14 Sally: “No wonder these companies are so badly run if people like you are the owners.”

If you read my comment properly, you will observe that I referred to “pension investors”, people who manage my pension under the scrutiny of representatives from my union and my employer…

@15 Dunc: “What a wonderful image… Tony Hayward in overalls and a hard hat.”

Not all that hard to imagine if you check Tony Hayward’s biography: a PhD holder in Geology who has worked for 20 years at BP drilling holes. Unusually for a business the size of BP, the Chief Exec actually does understand what the company does to make money, which qualifies him for involvement in resolving the Gulf of Mexico incident. (I agree that his technical background does not excuse his PR ineptitude nor his inability to appoint appropriate company spokespeople.)

If you recall the uproar that arose in the USA, politicians were proposing that BP should be removed from fixing their problem. Instead, politicians would have handed it over to people like the halfwits responsible for the post-Hurricane Katrina chaos.

RichardW:

“The wages a certain type of job pays is not a value judgement of that type of work but is determined by the pay of similar workers in other industries. It is how much other workers are paid that will determine how much you are paid. Labour is a commodity and the price of commodities is not determined by morals but are set in an amoral market.”

As far as it goes, that’s true.

But I’m not sure whether you’re criticising people for not appreciating the great amoral wisdom of the market, or criticising the market for not reflecting the moral sense of people.

I am doing neither, Jungle. What I am trying to do in minor way is to explain how the world actually works. I acknowledge that the way it works is not how people imagine it works or should work. This disconnect occurs because people have an irrational sense of value. They imagine that people should be paid for ‘ working hard ‘ or how much utility they bring to society. Moreover, they think of their wage as somehow distinctive to their own efforts. It really is not. Furthermore, our sense of values is far from rational. There is no rational reason why a doctor should be paid more than a plumber. Although it could be said the doctor is rewarded for his previous human capital investment by learning medicine. The reality is they extract rents by restricting entry just the same way all the professions receive higher rewards compared to the median by restricting entry.