The Man

The bottom of the market, minimum wage, is regulated, but the top of the market, executives, is not. The system is flawed, in these hard economic times it highlights the problem vividly. People are getting sacked but executive pay keeps going up. In the good times its easy to cover up. But what if some sort of regulation did exist. The companies that hire these executives would have saved millions in actual salary, shares, bonuses, perks, super and tax. That money could come in handy right about now, to ride out the bad economic times, keeping your capacity and human resource. All that shit companies were handing out about the workers being a valuable resource and CSR is non-sense, because when the time came these, supposedly valuable resources, are being thrown away. Executives are given many layers of pay, the base pay is so they are aligned with the shareholders goal of CSR. That means not polluting the earth and fucking everything up. Eg, sacking everyone. The other part is the bonuses and share options for meeting/exceeding performance targets. This is to align them with the shareholders goal of improved efficiency. Eg, dividends/capital growth.

Sol Trojilo, former CEO (Capacious Excremental Oligarch) of Telstra recently walked away with 40 million for 4 years work, he has not paid or will he ever pay tax in this country, in fact the company, Telstra, has to pay his taxes. And the only reason he is going back to where ever the fuck he came from, because of a moratorium on any income earned from his overseas investments expires, which would require him to pay tax. Actually this is not true, he has paid tax. GST, but it probably came out his expense account in any case. To add insult to injury, he is sacking him self, he is not resigning. This means he gets 12 months worth of pay in advance. Which is 3 million, but wait there’s more, because he is serving out a full financial year he gets a bonus of 5.1 million. The Telstra workers that got sacked recently did not receive 12 months pay. They did not get to decide what day they sack them selves on and they didn’t get any share options or bonuses. I’m sure if they had these things written in their contracts they would have worked as hard, if not harder than Sol the Troll.

Corporate welfare is another scam, which shows how unjust the system is. If you are on the dole you are required to perform a certain number of tasks before they will pay you. You need to apply for 10 jobs a fortnight fill in the appropriate book and take it to centrelink on the exact day. If you finish early, you cant take it in early. You must wait for your designated day. Additionally you must undertake full time jobseeker training. This requires you to go to a pre selected job agency everyday to learn about how to get a job. The corporations that receive these handouts, whilst well intentioned in trying to keep unemployment down, do not seem to have any performance targets, like employing an additional x number of people or investment in widgets. The transparency of these handouts is weak, we do not know what is going on. At least with the dole we can go to the centrelink website and read what is required to apply and how much money we can get if we have a part time job or no job. We only hear about these things through the media outlets and even then there is no detail, but the amount of money handed out and the supposed target of the funds.

Sitting around for extended periods of time, unemployed, will not be good once we get out of this slump. Because the capacity will be gone and we will have to import skilled workers to fill these jobs. As an immigrant I see this as a great opportunity for many foreigners. As an Australian citizen I see this as a loss of opportunity to improve the overall skills of the country at all levels... Granted I am still happily employed and study for my CPA so by the time this is all over I am going to buy my self a giant rake. Yes it’s going to be very specialised skills set and I wont have the diversity, but there is nothing stopping me from also getting that diversity in other ways.