Welcome to my Blog

I am a semi-retired former Scottish trade union policy wonk, now working on a range of projects. This includes the Director of the Jimmy Reid Foundation. All views are my own, not any of the organisations I work with. You can also follow me on Twitter. Or on Threads @davewatson1683. I hope you find this blog interesting and I would welcome your comments.

Monday 5 July 2010

Bosses gain while women lose out

More evidence today that private sector bosses are paying themselves huge pay increases, whilst lecturing everyone else on the need for pay restraint.

A survey by the pay consultancy MM&K has looked at the latest annual reports of 657 companies. Bosses at the UK's top 100 listed companies have seen their pay rise 5% since 2008 to an average £3.1m. This is despite a 1% fall in earnings per share over the same time. CEO's pay has quadrupled over the past ten years.


In stark contrast an audit of last month's Budget has shown that women will shoulder nearly three-quarters of the burden of cuts and tax increases. An independent analysis carried out by the House of Commons library describes the Budget as the "worst for women since the creation of the welfare state", showing that more than 70 per cent of the revenue raised from direct tax and benefit changes will come from female taxpayers: of the nearly £8 billion net revenue to be raised by the financial year 2014-15, nearly £6bn will be from women and just over £2bn from men.

As Shadow Welfare Secretary Yvette Cooper, said today "Women are bearing nearly three-quarters of the Tory-Liberal plans, while men are bearing just a quarter. This is despite the fact that women's income and wealth is still considerably lower than men's. Even more significant, this doesn't include the impact of public spending cuts. As women make up more of the public sector workforce they will be more heavily hit by the public sector pay freeze and the projected 600,000 net public sector job losses."

 

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