ANN CROTTY: Jobs summit’s pay-gap frippery
Disclosing pay differentials will do nothing to narrow rapidly widening gap
You could almost hear the remuneration consultants salivating as the recent jobs summit came to a tired close. Even the remarkably vague commitment that "business" would be encouraged to disclose pay differentials could generate tens of millions of rands for these people. The one certainty about the disclosure of pay differentials is that it will do nothing to reduce the rapidly widening gap between executives and workers. The assumption that disclosing pay differentials might somehow help to restrain the stratospheric increases that boards award their executives every year is based on the belief that our corporate leaders have some sensitivity to the social setting in which they operate. That was the same belief behind the initial campaign to get boards of listed companies to disclose details of their executive pay almost 20 years ago. All that disclosure did was ensure executive pay spiralled steeply upwards as executives ignored society – and possibly economic fundamentals — and ...
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