One Society � The gulf between employees’ pay and chief executives’ pay, and the adverse impacts on UK plc:
One of the findings caught my attentions:
Pay levels in the private sector have impacts which go beyond the company itself. Excessive incentives at the top can produce perverse behaviours. Excessively low pay externalises costs to the taxpayer (e.g. through the benefits system) estimated in the billions of pounds and is likely to reduce the ability of the economy to recover. Excessive gaps between incomes are associated with costly health and social problems as well as with higher levels of debt and economic volatility.
And it caught my attention because this issue of externalising costs means that the issue really is of interest and concern to the tax payer, aka the voter aka government. It is in our interest to be wary of private enterprise which talks the talk of the market but is surreptitiously sponging off the public purse (and it happens far more than the rhetoric would have you believe, the free market is rarely what it is cracked up to be).
The recommendations of the report seem, in this light, eminently sensible.
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