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Umm, Debbie?

Deborah Hargreaves, boss of campaign group the High Pay Centre said: ‘This is a further sign that the banking industry – and particularly Goldman Sachs – is completely oblivious to public opinion about bonuses and believes the only way to reward employees is through money.’

What would you prefer the rewards to be in? Peanuts?

41 thoughts on “Umm, Debbie?”

  1. 1) Longer holidays
    2) Guaranteed honour (ie knighthood after 30 years service in civil service)
    3) Early retirement (bankers & sportsmen get paid a lot as their careers are often over after 20 years)

  2. So there’s now a campaign group determined to force the private sector to pay high-performing employees less.

    I guess we must have solved all the world’s real problems if people are sinking money into this…

  3. How effing sad do you have to be to devote spare time to an organisation like the High Pay Centre? “I could do some meaningful charity work, I could just spend me time or family time, or I could give in to that intense envy I have for people who earn a lot more than I do and spend hours trying to get them to earn less.”

    Deborah Hargreaves, get yourself a life you silly mare.

  4. But if you compare and quantify work in terms of usefulness to society – he man who cleans the public toilets, the doctor, a surgeon who saves lives, the nurse who tends to the sick – rate far above the lowly Goldman shower. A bunch of crack heads – who don’t even give a flying toss about their customers – it takes a lot of money to assuage conscience – a lifetime is not enough.

  5. Since society isn’t paying the Goldman Sachs wages, Edward, it’s none of society’s effing business what they get paid. Their pay is determined by their value to Goldman Sachs. Or would you like to see a quango set everyone’s salaries according to some notion of societal worth?

  6. Shinsei: pensions and holidays are not paid with money? That one is new to me

    Docbud: are you sure Debbie is volunteering?

    Edward: two things
    1) thing is the society has, through markets and the price system, already decided
    2) bankers provide access to money when you need it which in my mind is pretty value adding. I mean it’s pretty difficult to invest in anything without money…

  7. bloke (not) in spain

    “But if you compare and quantify work in terms of usefulness to society – he man who cleans the public toilets, the doctor, a surgeon who saves lives, the nurse who tends to the sick – rate far above the lowly Goldman shower. ”

    But if you did compare and quantify work in terms of usefulness to society, Edward, the people you mention come way down the list. Far above them on the usefulness list is the humble plumber. Saved more lives & improved health more than any surgeon or nurse. They’re down with the bankers. Part of a complex society that needs wealth creation to permit & fund their specialties..

  8. The “value to society” argument is a dangerous one for the Left, as any honest definition and application of this would see most of the middle-class Left thrown out of work by the end of the week.

    Does society ‘need’ the BBC? Does it ‘need’ articles on Comment is Free? What pressing need does a Diversity Monitoring department at the local council meet? Does your local High Street really need that holistic artisan bread shop and deli?

  9. The more advanced, complex and specialised a society gets the more jobs which seem to be of no or little value but which would cause problems if they didn’t exist, because that is why they exist in the first place.

    This humble little screw in my hand after assembling this piece of machinery. Is it useful or necessary? It doesn’t look it, there must be millions of such screws around, but what happens when I turn the machine on? Oops.

  10. Does society ‘need’ the NHS? Or just ‘need’ doctors, nurses, hospitals and consultants without the multiple back office functions split all over the place?
    Does society ‘need’ so many MPs and councillors? Does society ‘need’ so many people working for the local council or civil service?
    Anyone remember the last time council workers went on strike? Did anyone notice anything different that day?

  11. DocBud: ‘Since society isn’t paying the Goldman Sachs wages, Edward, it’s none of society’s effing business what they get paid.’

    THIS! In spades, and with bells & whistles.

  12. Martin Davies: ‘Anyone remember the last time council workers went on strike? Did anyone notice anything different that day?’

    More left wing comments under newspaper articles & on blogs…?

  13. Emil

    Some people might choose to have an extra five days holiday a year rather than a 5% pay rise.

    So holidays are an alternative way of being paid.

  14. £31,500 for contributing absolutely sweet FA to society and she’s got the nerve to criticise those hard working bankers (PBUT) getting their just desserts. Isn’t it great if you can con dumb trustees to fund a pointless, unproductive organisation and grant you a salary to achieve nothing. Meanwhile, in the real world……

  15. “So holidays are an alternative way of being paid.”

    Same amount of pay for less work – looks like a pay rise to me, just taken in an unconventional manner.

    By my calculation based on 220 working days, 5 days extra is an increase in pay of about 2.35% per diam.

  16. £31.5k for a 3-day week campainging to reduce other people’s value.

    So someone is paying her to destroy value.

    These really are the end times.

  17. “the only way to reward employees is through money.” Silly girl; Goldman’s also reward their employees with a wonderfully high self-regard, amounting, some might think, to arrogance.

  18. I wish I could earn 31k for sitting around pontificating 3 days a week. Sadly, I’m more like the plumber mentioned above – a lot of the stuff I’ve physically made in the recent past has been for water treatment plants (clean and waste) – indeed, in my employers yard at the moment are three huge pumps that will supply most of the water for a large uk city.
    Sadly however, I earn nearer the national average wage – this isn’t any reflection on how mission critical the stuff we do is (if we don’t get the pumps ^^^ installed in a tight time window, folks will end up with no water at their taps) but instead reflects that training pump installation engineers isn’t actually that difficult (give me any fairly bright kid for a year, and they will be as good at it as anyone).

    So far, so supply and demand. What I don’t get is where the demand is for lefty handwringers over wages – we seem to have a massive oversupply, but this isn’t reflected in their wages… Surely the government isn’t rigging the market in some way?

  19. abacab

    Indeed it is a pay rise if you measure your pay per hour. However as you say it is in an “unconventional” way, which is the entire point. It is an alternative way of being paid. Plus you have to have an employer who is prepared to allow his staff to take 8, 10 or 12 weeks holiday a year.

  20. Bloke in North Dorset

    Theo’s talk about jobs being needed by society is a version of Kip’s Law:

    Those who talk about jobs being a need and value to Society always, but always, imagine they will be the ones deciding which jobs are of vale and what that value is worth.

  21. Bloke in North Dorset

    Your second paragraph has just crystallised Richard Murohy’s blog into three lines.

  22. Rob

    As always spot on – if Osborne was deadly serious about cutting the deficit, he would send a team of researchers into the Cambridge University Librayry/ Bodleian and have them trawl through back copies of the Guardian between April 1997 and May 2010, cross reference every job advertised in its Section 2 and basically make almost every single one redundant. The net loss to the average private sector worker would be zero, and when the ASI looked at it you’d have about 1.5 million fewer pen pushers and bureaucrats, cutting public expenditure and pension liabilities by billions….

  23. Hookers and blow. Alternative of being paid. Of course, consider how expensive the place these bankers are working and living at, getting paid is probably the only solution.

  24. Julia M, it’s actually fewer left wing comments under newspaper articles & on blogs

    At work they can trawl the net at will for thoughtcrime and such, whereas at home they can watch pr0n with the sound turned up.

  25. “believes the only way to reward employees is through money”

    Well, they could provide them with porsches, tarts and drugs instead of money I suppose. Would she prefer that?

  26. You do realise that banks create money out of nothing and pass it off as loans earning them interest?See “Money Creation in the Modern Economy” BofE Bulletin 2014 ; Martin Wolf FT “Strip private banks of the power to create money”

  27. There mutual be a course lefties go on which says ” if you just keep repeating it, it necessary the truth”. The banks and money creation was done to death on Ritchie’s blog. And yet still they come.

  28. One of my favourite pastimes is winding up the lefties in our UK hq about my nights out in HK with some boys from Goldman and Citi bank.

  29. @I The B of E and Martin Wolf aren’t lefties.
    Why don’t you take your cue from your leader:
    “No banks don’t create money” Tim Worstall 14July 2012;
    “The short explanation is that banks do indeed just create money out of thin air” the same oracle 19 Mar 2014.
    (Try proof reading your comments for intelligibility)

  30. @ DBC Reed
    Martin Wolf is leftish on several issues such as “should debtors repay their debts?”
    *Central* banks can create the apparition of money out of thin air but all they really do is dilute the rights of their existing creditors.
    Sometimes you are just boring.

  31. Ironman

    It’s pure Goebbels – but in the 21st century the key additional facet of the Big Lie technique is to tackle criticism by taking a tiny sentence out of context and thus conveying that the sentence destroys someone’s entire hypothesis. Both DBC and Arnald are masters of the technique though the former is at least civil.

  32. Van

    Yep, I was going to say the same thing. My.favourite.at the moment is Ritchie quoting one line from the BoE paper and saying “It agrees.with me”.
    In fact the BoE paper sets it all out, but Murphy and DBC won’t bother with all that detail and fact.

  33. Can I transfer my holidays to my mortgage lender to pay the mortgage? How about to the local council for council tax?
    If not then extra holiday is not worth as much as the money. My bills tend to go up over time, prefer wages to go up too!

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