Alistair Darling has called for pay restraint from the “boardroom to the shop floor”. Yeah sure, can you imagine boardroom fat cats listening to that and obeying it? As if. To them it will be a case of market forces entitling them to big pay awards.
Inflation is over 4% and pay increases no more than 2%. Credit is drying up (anyone still getting daily junk mail offering 10 months 0% on balance transfers?) and what their is is very expensive. People are needing to put aside money towards repaying their debt.
Core unavoidable expenses like food, rent, mortgages, Council Tax, utility bills are soaring in cost. The result must be that the amount left for spending on fun things like the latest electronics, fancy clothes, holidays, furnishing/decorating the home, DVD’s etc must be much less that a couple of years ago.
Has Alistair explained this to the British Retail Consortium? When he did was it, I wonder, in a nice patronising tone like this, “now people, the plebs are not going to be coming into your shops as much and I have not given much money to spend when they do. You must make sure that your shareholders are told that the dividend and share price are going to be a lot lower for a few years. It helps to do this if you also make sure that you do not have any management bonus until things have sorted themselves out.”
Posted by harpymarx 
