Tuesday 22 November 2011

Pay attention, children

That nice Dr Heather McGregor* from executive search firm Taylor Bennett will explain all about executive pay. A silly man on the radio said it didn't seem fair that top executives' pay has grown so much more quickly than everybody else's over the last 30 years.

That was silly of him, wasn't it? Big boys and girls don't worry their darling little heads about babyish ideas like fairness, now do they? This is what Dr McGregor told him:

Anyone over the age of seven who says things are not fair needs to have a reality check.

Some people think that  employees might sit on Renumeration Committees, the way they do in those nasty socialist countries like ... er ... Germany. What a lot of silly billies! Dr McGregor explained why they were just being silly:

You would not give your children a say in how much money you allocate for clothes, for haircuts...
I know most employees are old enough to have families, drive cars, have bank accounts, save for pensions and do other grown-up things, but we mustn't forget that they are really only like dear little toddlers, and it would be ever so silly if toddlers told their mummies and daddies how to behave, now wouldn't it?

I wonder where McGregor, educated at the  independent St Mary's Hall girls' school (which, despite benefiting from tax relief by virtue of its status as a "charity" and charging fees of £12,609 to £20,817 per year, got into "financial difficulties" in 2009 and was taken over by the exclusive Roedean school), picked up the ideas that fairness is a foolish notion, fit only for children, and that the lower orders lack the maturity and intellectual capacity to have a meaningful opinion on the entitlements of their betters?

Any ideas?


*Salary £108,000. If her recruiting skills are as lacklustre as her debating skills, Taylor Bennett could save a few quid by replacing her with somebody on a nursery school assistants' wage, without any loss of intellectual rigour. If they recruited an actual nursery school assistant, the candidate would benefit from already having experience of talking down to people as if they were infants.

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