Like most people, I’m not really clear at what stage we are in the Covid-19 outbreak. Confused briefing to the papers (and a new strap line that doesn’t include “Stay Home”) suggests to me that in general the government *is* easing the lockdown de fact…Read more…
Capitalism: down with the sickness
I’m just a humble labour & corpgov wonk, so most of the time the kinds of things that interest me are buried in the business pages. But it feels like, as with the financial crisis, questions about who controls businesses and how, and in whose inter…Read more…
Alignment in exec pay
There’s a lot of commentary from a lot of sources these days arguing against a shareholder-centric corporate governance model. So far, the commentary is far ahead of any policy, and certainly in the US there is scepticism about the motives of those – l…Read more…
George Orwell’s pay ratio
This, from The Lion and the Unicorn, popped into my head the other day:
II. Incomes. Limitation of incomes implies the fixing of a minimum wage, which implies a managed internal currency based simply on the amount of consumption-goods availab…Read more…
Chief execs, incentives and discounting
A quick plug for Are chief executives overpaid? by Deborah Hargreaves, formerly of the High Pay Centre. Spoiler alert: the answer is YES.
The book is a quick run through what top pay looks like, why it has changed and grown, some of the attempts …Read more…
Votes on Persimmon remuneration report
I’m not sure anyone has looked at individual investor voting decisions on the remuneration report at Persimmon’s AGM back in April, so I thought I’d take a look. As people may remember, there was a large vote against the rem report, and abstentions and…Read more…
Pay ratios – an important step forward
Tomorrow will see the introduction of regulations that will make it mandatory for larger listed companied to disclose the ratio between chief executive salaries and the average pay for employees of the same firm. Although the UK has actually been beate…Read more…
Keep your nose out of executive pay!
This is from the concluding paragraph of a recent academic paper on executive pay:
While the pay controversies fueling calls for regulation have touched on legitimate issues concerning executive compensation, the most vocal critics of …Read more…
Exec pay, again
Two bits in the FT caught my eye recently, and I think both are indicative of why executive pay will continue to cause fuel the public’s belief that corporate boards are making out like bandits and there needs to radical action to tackle it.
First is …Read more…
Persimmon result tells a lot about shareholders and executive pay
As you may have noted, there was a rather large vote against Persimmon’s remuneration report earlier in the week. This was in response to a £75m award to the chief executive, reduced from the original £110m.
First things first – the pay award was the …Read more…
Rhetoric, politics and executive pay
I’ve been reading Enough Said by Mark Thompson, which is a thoughtful take on political language, and more generally the relationship between the public, politics and the media. I have some minor gripes already, but overall it is well worth a read.
I’…Read more…
Fat Cat Day – Ladbrokes special
Today is Fat Cat Day, the day on which the High Pay Centre calculates that the average FTSE100 CEO has “earned” as much as someone on average earnings gets in a year.
As we’re focused on exec pay, I thought I’d contribute an update to a blog I wrote …Read more…
Shareholders go quiet on executive pay
Once again, ahead of the UK AGM season we had the now traditional “boards braced for stormy AGM season” story. Anyone who follows this debate will know what I mean. We’ve all seen several times the claim that a second “shareholder spring” is coming as …Read more…
Internal logic versus external stupidity
I’ve blogged about National Express a few times over the years, mainly in relation to its anti-union activity. But today a story in the FT about its executive pay arrangements caught my eye. I think it’s a great example of why performance-related …Read more…
Is this what asset managers really think about executive pay?
There was a fascinating piece in The Times a couple of days ago about asset managers threatening to get tough on executive pay. You know, the news story that now appears before every AGM season, quite often accompanied by claims this could be the “stor…Read more…
Public supports tough line on exec pay shocker
As I blogged previously, the commentariat was united last week in its certainty that Jeremy Corbyn was talking rubbish when he proposed some pretty tough positions on executive pay.
Amazingly, it turns out the the public favours taking a very tough li…Read more…
Capping executive pay
It’s fair to say that today has not been an unblemished success for Labour. Nonetheless, despite everything, there is something encouraging in what Corbyn has been saying about executive pay.
First off, let’s tune out the noise. Much of the politico c…Read more…
ASOS exec pay in the spotlight
I blogged last month about the ASOS AGM results, which still puzzle me a little, but the big takeaway was a significant shareholder vote against the company’s remuneration report.
Well, today we can see there are good reasons for shareholders and othe…Read more…
ASOS AGM action!
This week saw some great campaigning by the GMB as part of their ongoing battle against poor working practices within ASOS, which has had a particular focus on the distribution centre in Barnsley run by XPO. The GMB had a “Catwalk of Shame” outside, an…Read more…
For short-termism in pay and against shareholder empowerment
Everyone knows we should tie executive remuneration to long-term metrics and give shareholders more powers to oversee pay policies, right?
Yeah, except that if we make execs wait for rewards they sharply discount them (if some really put much value on …Read more…