Marginal productivity is for the other guy

["Michael Keaney" <Michael.Keaney@xxxxxx>]

Spearheading the latest ineffectual populist campaign the whole family
can join, the Guardian helpfully signals the difficult issues involved:

Anger at boom in executive pay

(snip)

But Sir Ken Jackson, Blairite leader of the AEEU engineering union and
a supporter of public service reforms, sounded a different note.
"Where performance merits competitive levels of pay, then we support
companies rewarding their workers at all levels, including the
boardroom."

======

Prompting one to ask about remuneration for AEEU full time officials...

Any trade union leader who sports a "sir" or any badge of toadying (OBE,
MBE, CBE) -- and there's a lot -- sold the jerseys years ago.
Particularly if he is not yet retired.

In the early 1980s film-maker Ken Loach was commissioned by newly begun
and independent Channel 4 to film a series of documentaries on the
leadership of the British trade unions, "Questions of Leadership". These
were completed, but never shown, and, apparently, are still banned. This
is John Pilger's take on the subject, since he seems to have been one of
the few lucky enough to have seen them:


The big unions, like the TGWU, are still absurdly portrayed by the
Tories and much of the media as a potentially dangerous fifth column in
the body politic. Yet without the timidity and inaction of some of the
famous union 'barons', the legislative attack on trade union rights in
the Eighties probably would have failed, along with the devastation of
the steel and mining industries, and the privatising of the docks.

This perspective on the unions has always been something of a taboo. It
was considered so threatening during the early part of Thatcher's reign
that a 1982 television series by Ken Loach, Questions Of Leadership, for
the fledgling Channel 4, was withdrawn and then drastically cut.
Consider the opening sequence of the Loach films. Over archive film of a
mass meeting of trade unionists during the Thirties Depression, the
sound-track begins to play the chorus from Gilbert and Sullivan's
Iolanthe:

Bow low ye lower middle classes;

Bow, bow ye tradesmen;

Bow ye masses . . .

As the mockery continues, the pictures dissolve to a parade of earnest
young men, standing on platforms, exhorting the masses. Then they grow
older, florid, comfortable, and become portraits of self-satisfaction,
dressed in the ermine of the House of Lords. They are Joe Gormley, Vic
Feather, Richard Marsh, all former trade union leaders (soon to be
joined by Lord Len Murray). The commentary says, 'There are some trades
union leaders who have in their own person achieved the harmony of the
classes.' Rank and file trade unionists speak about the meaning of
'democracy' within the big unions, referring to 'small bureaucratic,
centralised groups of people . . . that prevent individual members from
playing a role within the union and the general direction the union is
going'. Were these not the familiar media words of right-wingers
complaining about the 'militants' infiltrating their 'democratic'
institutions? Yes, but in the Loach film the voices came from ordinary
trade unionists analysing the hold of the trade union establishment on
the organisations and fortunes of millions of ordinary people.

>From They Never Walk Alone (Part 1)
http://pilger.carlton.com/print/48727

As Joe Gormley once said when discovered in a posh restaurant:
"nothing's too good for the working class".

Michael K.