The corporate bonus culture

It's quite sickening isn't it how in 1978 the chief executive of British Aerospace was paid £29,000 a year. Yet In 2010, the chief executive of BAE Systems, Ian King, was paid over £2.3m, a rise of 8,000%...... in real terms his salary should be £120,000 to be in line with 1978's reckoning on what he was/is worth.....

The problem is that the remuneration committees made up of some non executive directors etc decide their Chief Executive Officers pay..... and he in turn sits on a committee to decide their pay...In effect they decide on each others' pay. and they probably all go around to the golf club afterwards and have a damn good laugh about it.... meanwhile the axe falls on 3000 jobs at BAE Systems at the tax payers cost. While Mr King watches his interest mount up...... Greed is never an attractive thing to witness, and no amount of "but he's/she has done this or that or whatever" quite makes it right to be paid in most cases 400 times more than a normal employee.....

Look at Thomas Cook their share price tumbled to just 50p over a 4 year period and had to borrow £200 million to keep trading.... did their outgoing CEO get a boot up the arse and did he bang his head on the way out of the door ?  NO !!! he got £1 million ....

It's utterly disgusting that idiots are being rewarded for doing a job that another person could do equally well for less pay AND still be comfortably off.... CEO's aren't "special" people, they aren't any different to any other person on the planet....They aren't uber intelligent, or gifted (although some like to think they are..... and I've met a few)  they were just connected at the right time to the right people, or were in a particular school or club.... It's all about back scratching and it reminds me of pigs in a pen rubbing up against a post and each other..... except our pigs are running our economy and corporate businesses and they are getting fatter and more gluttonous as the months roll by whilst everybody else sees their hard earned cash evaporating......it's reminiscent of a feeding frenzy..... filling up their pot bellies with more and more cash....

Some CEO's are worth every penny and deserve to earn what they earn, but I personally would be uncomfortable taking that kind of salary no matter how good I was at my job...... The whole system stinks and I've got to be honest I hope it all collapses around their ears and with that I'll throw in the bankers and financiers..... The Hesters and Goodwins of this world who are deeply and unattractively  greedy.... and that goes for anyone who takes a massive bung for just doing their job.......