Go on, then.
Next time a bunch of overpaid, incompetent wankers (bankers, local council chief executives, right-wing entertainers, I'm looking at you) tell us they'll leave the country if we cease to lavish them with public money and affection, I suggest we all agree just to smile quietly at them and say nothing.
(ubergeekian, Wed 11 Jul 2012, 22:39, 2 replies)

Two of those three
Bankers and local coucil chief execs.

These are easy targets for the gutter press and the like as being overpiad for what they do (see also: footballers). The thing is, no-one ever seems to take into account the value that they bring to the organisations that they work for.

With bankers, it's easy to refute the "overpaid" tag - banks aren't charities, they aren't there to employ the useless (that's what the NHS is for. I should know, they've provided me with somewhere to go during the day and plenty of beer tokens for the last 8 years). These "overppaid" bankers who earn millions a year will have generated many times that amount for the bank they work for in order to get that money. Granted, they might not be slaving away down t'pit all day every day to get that money, but they will have worked long, stressful hours, with the constant threat of "underperform and you'll be out on your arse" hanging over them.

As for public-sector chief execs - this is actually quite a difficult job and pays accordingly. If you paid £40K, rather than £120K+, you would only get £40K worth of chief exec, which just wouldn't be enough to run an organisation like a council. The people with the actual skills and abilities to have a job that pays so much would just get a job in the private sector and the public sector would be in a worse state than it is already. Slightly odd thing about the top strata of managers in the NHS: it's actually much, much easier for a trust to get rid of an underperforming, £120k a year exec than it is for them to get rid of a lazy, useless £12k a year clerk - which is actually where a lot of the NHS' waste lies.
(ScousersPet, Thu 12 Jul 2012, 10:38, closed)

Oh yeah?
Those bankers and the millions of pounds of value they generate. Does that include RBS, HBOS, Northern Rock, Lehman and all the other banks where astronomically paid staff have lost millions or billions?

Those local council chief executives who must be paid vast sums to keep their talents from the private sector. Ever heard of a local council chief executive actually going to the private sector?
(ubergeekian, Thu 12 Jul 2012, 11:16, closed)