Why would any company pay over the odds for senior staff??

Excellent!!

At the next AGM whilst you have your shareholders hat on, stick your shareholder hand up and vote against 'your' CEO's remuneration package if you don't think that you are getting value for money that's fine by me. What isn't fine is a government committee, cross party social think tank, or are you calling for a referendum/public vote, to decide how much I or anyone else can get paid

Institutional investors have started doing so as they finally grasped the point I have being making for years.

As directors effectively recommend each others pay and the public school educated have a sense of entitlement. Witness the publicly funded BBC - they claim they pay big salaries for top talent but a couple of years ago ITV complained that the very small marketplace was being distorted by the BBC paying their (self-entitled) senior staff / 'talent' over the odds.

The top talent argument totally holds water, unless I've failed to notice that someone has already instigated the maximum wage limit since this thread started. The people that we have are or you must presume so by and large happy to work in our free market

Oh yes let's all go to the USA, really? No matter where the big bucks are, you are aware that income isn't the only measure of contentment or the only reason to live in a particular place?

Which is fine by me as it is market forces that must be driving it? This is not the same thing as the government insisting upon a maximum wage because of the illogical nonsensical argument that we have a minimum wage therefore its only fair....I'm glad that 'your' institutional investors have finally grasped your point though

Except there isn't a free or open market in the selection and remuneration of CEOs and other business executives. Executive selection and remuneration is decided by a small subset of stakeholders with specific interests in mind (I deliberately don't use the term shareholders as most shares in large UK corporations are not held by individual investors but by other corporate entities managing other people's capital). This is why CEOs and other execs tend to come from a small in-group of people and the skills and experience required is less tangible than certain other well paid, highly skilled roles i.e. you would expect a Consultant Surgeon to be a qualified doctor, with many years of certified training and experience in their specialist field, whereas CEOs and executives may not actually have any specialist skills and experience in their industry and instead have more opaque credentials where their exact contribution is harder to quantify.

I get that to an extent - but in the cutthroat world of private business, if the CEO doesn't have the skills and experience required and therefore doesn't deliver the results the stakeholders you refer to demand, he or she is moved on; with significantly more alacrity than would happen in the public sector.

So whilst I take your point that exec skillsets are not as immediately quantifiable - results are, and they live or die by those results.

I don't necessarily recognise the covert world of interchangeable CEO's you allude to though; to my knowledge - firsthand - that type of appointment is handled by specialist recruiters, and they fish in a large pond; albeit they're not using Indeed or Facebook to source candidates, which is entirely appropriate.

www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 29396.html At this rate there'll be one person standing at the end with all the money and the rest will be dead.

www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 29396.html At this rate there'll be one person standing at the end with all the money and the rest will be dead.

That will only happen when the mega-rich have taught their robots to consume the tat they peddle. At that point people become dispensible.

Very few wealthy people have a social conscience with most only being driven by the desire to be wealthier than their peers.

Although Corbyn's idea of an upper wage limit may, in some ways, sound sensible, it will never happen and sadly, people end up like commodities and if a few end up "worn out", they are easily replaced.

Nobody would mind if someone worked twice as hard as the next man and was paid twice as much. However, wealth is often gained by exploiting others and yet we are encouraged to look up to these people and admire their status.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/20 ... says-study This is an interesting read on this topic. Share price, while not a perfect reflection of company performance, is the best approximation we have. The average pay package of a FTSE 350 CEO increased 82% from 2001 to 2014. The return on invested capital? Less than 1%. I disagree with the idea of a maximum wage. The reason for a minimum wage is so that people can survive (in theory) off what they earn. There's no such justification applicable to a maximum wage. However, this isn't to say that inequality isn't an issue, particularly when regressive taxes like VAT have been increased since the Conservatives came to power. We need to do more in terms of progressive taxation as inequality has high negative external costs, for example the implications for mental and physical health. Poorer people also have a higher propensity to consume and also a lower propensity to import, both of which are good things for the economy.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/20 ... says-study This is an interesting read on this topic. Share price, while not a perfect reflection of company performance, is the best approximation we have. The average pay package of a FTSE 350 CEO increased 82% from 2001 to 2014. The return on invested capital? Less than 1%. I disagree with the idea of a maximum wage. The reason for a minimum wage is so that people can survive (in theory) off what they earn. There's no such justification applicable to a maximum wage. However, this isn't to say that inequality isn't an issue, particularly when regressive taxes like VAT have been increased since the Conservatives came to power. We need to do more in terms of progressive taxation as inequality has high negative external costs, for example the implications for mental and physical health. Poorer people also have a higher propensity to consume and also a lower propensity to import, both of which are good things for the economy.