Executive Pay

Yesterday the Australian Financial Review published a report on executive salaries in Australia. The paper provided us with pages and pages of analysis of the post-GFC public outcry over executive salaries, and into the industrial relations debate that has reared its head again since the Qantas fleet was grounded. But amongst all this analysis, the paper overlooked a glaringly obvious and disturbing issue.

The AFR no doubt knows that IR reform, which goes hand-in-hand with the old CEO executive remuneration versus union bargaining for pay increases chestnut, is shaping up to be a key battleground in the next election campaign. However, the newspaper completely overlooked the issue of gender and executive salaries.

The list of 287 companies and roughly 300 or so individuals that make up Australia’s highest paid CEOs and Executive Chairman comprises just eight women. The statistics here are almost as alarming as the fact that there was entirely no mention of this in the commentary.

Continue reading "I am woman, hear me roar… except in the boardroom" »

Much of the public commentary around the Qantas dispute has been so undergraduate that you would think it had been authored by the people at Occupy Wall Street. But it is Qantas itself which invited much of the negative coverage by not thinking through its tactics last week ahead of the dramatic events of the weekend.

This dispute has at its centre a pretty simple question – does Qantas management have the right to manage Qantas? Or should Tony Sheldon from the Transport Workers Union have veto power over everything from how many staff the airline employs, when and where its aircraft hangars are built, who maintains its fleet, to whether it is allowed to expand into Asia?

I am not an aviation writer but at a guess I would say that as a former senior executive at Aer Lingus and the successfully expansionist boss of the fledgling airline Jetstar, Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce knows a bit more about running airlines than Tony Sheldon.

Continue reading "The Qantas dispute is not about Alan Joyce’s salary" »

Is it right that foreign employees of an Australian company get paid Third World wages while foreign managers of the same company get paid first-world salaries?

Do we still believe in the principle of equal pay for equal work? Or is it a case of George Orwell’s famous line in his novel Animal Farm to the effect that we are all equal but some are more equal than others?

All good questions as Australian companies are increasingly shifting operations offshore. We are told that Australian wages and salaries are too high and that moving offshore will “save” the company money by cutting labour costs.

Continue reading "The high salaries and low morals of corporate Australia" »

Nowhere is the disconnect between the business fraternity and the wider community greater than on the issue of executive salaries.

Forget trying to explain a $10m-plus pay packet with references to “international benchmarks” and “long-term incentives”. The public simply doesn’t accept that anyone, no matter how brilliant, is worth $190,000 a week - or 150 times the average salary.

Given this depth of anger among voters towards the occasionally obscene salaries received by our corporate leaders, the Rudd government has shown remarkable restraint on the issue.

Continue reading "On the pay divide, opinion counts as much as coin" »