Capping executive salaries

Who, me? This f***wit pays himself $12 million+ per year from Telstra's bottomless pit. But 'Sol the Mexican' is not even worth $500,000. Talk about "foreigners taking Australian jobs", this corporate pig takes the cake.

Let’s just make it $500,000 max. across the board – full stop.

The move by new US President Barak Obama to cap the salaries of top executives at firms that have to be bailed out by the Government is to be applauded. But it might fall under the category of ‘too little, too late.’

I’m not criticising Obama of course, it’s not his fault that previous administrations have allowed CEOs and other executives to pay themselves obscene salaries & bonuses. He’s made a move in the right direction. 

But Obama’s new rules that impose a salary cap of $US500,000 ($AUS776,000) on top executives of companies which have received federal bailout money do not go far enough, in my opinion, and should be made to apply to ALL executives in ALL publicly listed companies.

And the same goes for Australia where, in proportional terms, we’ve got some of the biggest corporate abusers of excessive salary packages in the entire world – witness our major commercial & merchant banks and companies like Telstra, AMP, etc, etc. Packages of $20 million plus are almost commonplace, even in companies that haven’t been performing.

But this shouldn’t be a question of how well the company is doing. These executives are usually no more valuable to a company’s success than its lowest paid worker and what they’re doing is just ripping off the shareholders, their own workers AND the general public by taking the cream off the top instead of re-investing it in new projects that provide new jobs.

Worse still, a lot of the so-called success of some of our bigger companies has come via their ability to shed jobs at the lower end and either outsource the work overseas to third world countries on much lower wages, or just demand more output from those ‘lucky’ enough to still be employed. Telstra’s Sol Trujillo is a prime example of “how to get rich on the back of the poor.”

If PM Rudd were to introduce a law that limited ALL executive salaries to $500,000 there’d certainly be a massive outcry from the business world. Well so what? If they’re not happy on half a mill a year then guess what? There’d be plenty of well (and better) qualified people willing to take their place.

Heck, I might even apply myself; I’d be happy with $500,000 a year, wouldn’t you? I also think I’d do a better job than the likes of ‘Sol the Mexican’ from Telstra – I mean, who wouldn’t?