Commonwealth Bank CEO Ralph Norris... All smiles and $16 million the richer.
$16 million!
That's how much Ralph Norris, the boss of the Commonwealth bank, gets paid a year to defend over-the-odds mortgage rate increases, high credit card charges, fees for lending our money to his bank and exorbitant small business loans.
He's also paid that money to work his staff to the bone because it is ''too costly'' to employ more staff. He calls the result customer service.
Remember, this is the same bank that last year offered some of its staff a wage freeze and the rest a real wage cut.
But when it comes to Christmas 365 days a year, Norris is not alone.
All the banking bosses are raking it in.
According to Matt Drummond in the Australian Financial Review, the "combined pay cheques for the big four bank chiefs have grown by 70 per cent over the last five years".
And it's not only the banks. The ACTU's recent report on executive pay shows the CEOs of all the top listed companies have been doing extremely well, thank you very much.
The ACTU's Executive PayWatch found that the total remuneration of the average CEO this year will be $6.4 million. That's a 17 per cent increase over the last year, or an extra $940,000.
By comparison, full time workers' wages went up 5.2 per cent. For someone on the average wage, that's about an extra $3200 a year, not much more than the $2600 daily increase for CEOs.
The ACTU has expressed righteous indignation. But it will do nothing other than huff and puff. It is part of the problem, letting chief executives get away with these huge increases while, for example, meekly accepting pay freezes on the low paid in 2009.
It is not as if CEOs and capital deserve this largesse.
The parasites across the globe who bought you the global financial crisis, instead of being before the courts for their actions, are stuffing their pockets with more of our money - as if 2008 had never happened. Yet in country after country, from Europe to North America, ordinary workers are being thrown on the scrap heap.
It's not as if our unelected mega millionaires deserve these amounts of pay. No one can contribute 100 times the worth of the average worker.
Indeed, in my view, bosses contribute no value at all. The real creators of profit are workers. CEOs merely shuffle the value we create around the monopoly board.
Both Labor and the Coalition are entombed in the failed ideology of neo-liberalism.
Over the past three decades, both parties have overseen a massive increase in inequality in Australia as part of a deliberate trickle down strategy.
Labor in government will do nothing about obscene executive salaries.
It worships at the altar of profit and these huge CEO pay packets are a result of the magic of the market. To attack them would upset the sensibilities of this mythical market god and, if enraged, he could bring all sorts of plagues upon our houses.
The ACTU says that the profit share of national income is now near the record highs it reached in 2008, while wages share of income is the lowest since 1964.
So why doesn't the ACTU lead a wages breakout to right that historic wrong? Well, it too believes in the trickle down theory.
Since 1983, it has collaborated with the bosses to engineer this massive shift in rewards to capital.
It has destroyed rank and file organisation in unions and abandoned industrial action as the way to defend and increase wages, conditions and jobs.
The result of this failed class collaborationist strategy? Union membership at very low levels. Historic shifts in the share of national income going to capital. Massive increases in inequality. And Ralph Norris on $16 million a year.
Instead of just whingeing about executive salaries, ACTU, do something. Lead an industrial campaign to win back what the profit vultures have stripped from us over the past few decades. If a 17 per cent pay increase is good enough for the bosses, it is good enough for us too.
This article first appeared in enpassantwith John Passant.