From yesterday’s Sunday Times: Boards braced for wave of investor anger on pay.
Well, perhaps.
As the story reports, there was a strong vote against an £18m deal for Astra’s Pascal Soriot and some other bits and bobs.
But what history shows is that these mooted protests usually turn into a paltry 15% vote against the CEOs pay rise.
Papers like to pretend this is some sort of stinging rebuke, rather than an 85% approval rating of which Saddam Hussein would have been proud.
If you plotted a graph of how many times The Guardian has done stories about a looming crack down on executive pay and ran it alongside what has actually happened to executive pay, they would be parallel charts.
This here shows that CEO pay has risen 940% since 1978 in America and the numbers are barely any more restrained in the UK.
CEO’s might have got better since the late 70s, but not 940% better.
Let’s assume it is the job of flaks to get the bosses pay up – since he signs their cheques – and the job of hacks to rein it in.
Scores in so far: Hacks 0, Flaks 987.
Taking a beating on this issue is bad enough. Pretending it is even a proper fight in the first place is even worse.
