to all and sundry(debtors ?), page-32

From The Sydney Morning Herald
http://business.smh.com.au/business/cap-salaries-of-chief-executives-unions-20090531-brsm.html

Cap salaries of chief executives: unions
Mark Davis Political Correspondent
June 1, 2009

THE ACTU will press the Federal Government to cap chief executive salaries at no more than 10 times the average wage inside their companies and to allow company shareholders to sue executives for poor performance.

It will release an analysis today showing remuneration packages for chief executives at Australia's top 50 companies listed on the share market rose more than five-fold in the 15 years to 2005. It found the average chief executive's pay package had risen from 18 times average weekly earnings in 1990 to 63 time average earnings, or $3.4 million, in 2005.

In a statement issued last night the ACTU secretary, Jeff Lawrence, said "outrageous" executive salaries and bonus payments had encouraged a culture of excessive risk-taking and short-term thinking in the upper echelons of the corporate world. This culture had been one of the major causes of the global financial crisis.

He said unions would debate the issue at this week's ACTU Congress and develop industrial strategies to back its proposed legal changes for curbing executive pay.

"Year after year of virtually unlimited increases in CEO pay packets mean that executive remuneration is now out of all proportion with the work performed," he said. "Ordinary workers fail to see how the rise in executive pay and bonuses over the past decade can be justified when their own wages have risen much more slowly at 4.2 per cent a year.

"The union proposal would return executive pay to a more realistic level and link rewards and bonuses to the genuine growth and productivity of the enterprise rather than the smoke and mirrors guesswork used by many company boards."

The Federal Government has asked the Productivity Commission to examine executive remuneration and ways of better aligning the interests of executives with those of shareholders and the community.