It would take a Skycity cleaner 113 years of continuous labour to earn what her CEO earns in only one year. She would start work at the first All Blacks Test Match in 1903, and work every week from then, through Gallipoli and World War One, the Great Depression and World War Two, the Rocking Fifties, the Swinging Sixties, the Striking Seventies, the Yuppie Eighties, the foundation of Skycity 19 years ago in 1996, the whole decade of the Helen Clarke Government in the Naughties, right up to Unite’s first victories against Zero Hours contracts today.
113 years to earn what the boss earns in one.
Joe is a social justice activist and organiser for Unite Union.
So what? The CEO is more highly qualified and has a higher degree of responsibility, cleaning toilets is easy, managing a large business is not. People get paid according to what they offer, in the way of experience, qualifications, skill set, work ethic etc.
Stephen – which sounds to me suspiciously like an ACT rational for low wages…
I don’t think anyone’s disputing that a CEO ought to be paid more than a cleaner; that much is patently obvious. It’s the level of disparity that’s at issue. I don’t care what your occupation is — 3.5 million dollars is an obscene amount of money to be paid for anything.
And I really think we need to stop using the word ‘earned’ when it comes to these grotesquely bloated salaries. Unless you’re raising the dead for a living, you’re overpaid.
I think a cleaner should be paid more than a CEO of skycity, they contribute more to society. Casinos make people addicted to gambling, so they take away from society.
If cleaning toilets is so easy, why don’t you try it?
I have cleaned toilets before, it is called a work ethic where you are prepared to start at the bottom and do your time and work your way up. I don’t expect you lefties to understand that.
Yep, do your time alright.
Do your time until you are dead…. And can’t even buy a house.
People get paid according to what they offer, in the way of experience, qualifications, skill set, work ethic etc.
What a fantasy.
It’s about power.
Haven’t you ever wondered why NZ CEO’s salaries are always justified by comparing them to whatever equivalent positions pay in first world economies like the USA, and yet NZ waged worker salaries have to compete with the sweatshop labour of the third world.
We need better trolls.
Are you Stephen Joyce, the black ops person from National? If you are you are a liar, because you never cleaned toilets.
Ahh – but this is a matter of fair pay for fair work and degrees of pay vs individual production for an organisation. Skycity NEEDS to have clean facilities for it’s own productivity so either they need to hire someone or sideline someone else to do this – dropping that person’s production level within the company. Thus cleaners are essential for company productivity. CEOs are managerial, thus they are responsible for decisions surround overall productivity but are not actually a part of the profit making within the casino. What is at question is: is the amount paid to this CEO relative to his TRUE value to the company’s productivity. Too often it appears to us ‘hicks’ that CEOs sits within a board room with Boards, all giving themselves big salaries & fees while squeezing their productive staff’s salaries and conditions – and thus they undermine there own companies productivity. Is this CEO really doing 3.5million worth of productivity to Skycity, when the rest of it’s workforce are underpaid relative to their value to this company? Is he infact hindering the productivity level?
What an utterly ridiculous thing to say. It’s arguments like this that give campaigns for pay parity or a living wage a bad name. A cleaner does not have the same responsibilities, experience, education or skill set as the chief executive of a large company.
I’m all for pay parity where it concerns equal pay for equal work. But trying to argue that it’s unfair the boss of a big company earns 100 times as much as a cleaner is just plain dumb.
My suggestion, if the cleaner wants to earn more, is perhaps seek a different vocation. Perhaps one that pays better.
So, Ben, how many people do you think can be a CEO of a large company? Your argument kinda collapses in a smouldering heap when it comes up hard against real life and different human abilities.
Otherwise we’d all be Warren Buffets, right?
For Stephen and Ben – this might help; https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2015/06/26/poor-people-let-them-eat-cake-grow-veges-not-breed-and-other-parroted-right-wing-cliches/#!prettyPhoto/2/
I don’t think the expectation is that a cleaner earns as much as a CEO however a cleaner deserves a life where her children are fed and warm and she can have time off to relax and enjoy life outside of work.
A CEO can only drive one car at a time, live in one house etc so they don’t need these huge salaries they seem to be earning.
It all becomes pointless extravagance after a certain income. No good for the people and no good for the planet.
A CEO can only drive one car at a time, live in one house and use one clean toilet at a time.
As usual the attacks on the premise of the discussion don’t acknowledge the interdependence of people and what they do, just the ranking of them.
So the cleaner should get out and get a proper job which pays well. Who pray tell does the cleaning then?
Or another example.
An A&E nurse earns $50k pa. Let’s assume she is really frugal and saves 10% of gross income ($5k) year.
Ignoring for the moment the effect of compound interest if this money is invested conservatively in bank term deposit, it takes our nurse 10,000 years to accumulate the $50mill fortune of a currency speculator known as John Key.
Allowing for compound interest it might be not quite so many thousands of years.
So:
– who works harder, our nurse or our currency speculator?
– whose job is more difficult?
– whose job is of greater social value (i.e. produces benefits for others)?
Answer those questions and then tell me that markets don’t allocate income perversely.
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