Bits & bobs

1. Saturday's FT editorial here about the return of bonuses in the banking industry is worth a read. It's very sceptical that this has much to do with the value of what is being provided by those getting the rewards, and the key point is that basically shareholders are being (willingly?) taken for a ride.

2. But then over on the Torygraph we read about how the ABI (yep, them again - where are the NAPF and the IMA?) is warning companies to be sensible about pay of face opposition.

3. A quick snippet from a book that I ordered at the end of last year that I'm yet to start, but which looks well interesting - The Ownership of Enterprise. It takes a look at why different forms of ownership appear in different industries, so quite a lot in there about employee ownership.

In firms that are incorporated... formal control generally involves only the right to elect the firm's board of directors and to vote on a relatively small set of fundamental issues, such as merger or dissolution of the firm. Moreover, in large business corporations the shareholders, who have formal control, are often too numerous and too dispersed to exercise even these limited voting rights very meaningfully, with the result that corporate managers have substantial autonomy.

Err... that's all you really need to know to get started in the ownership debate right now, isn't it?

Labour Against The Machine vs Dave Cowell-eron

In one corner a left-wing outfit led by a frontman (allegedly) prone to expletive-laden outbursts, achieved mainstream popularity in the 1990s, but their support has faded away since.

In the other corner a highly-polished newcomer. He certainly looks and sounds the part, but his lyrics don't seem to actually mean anything, and you feel like it's a synthetic product somehow.

I'm with Cheryl Cole this time.

What a 'no frills' council looks like

Here & here.

Retirement NEST-egg

Not sure I like the new name for Personal Accounts (itself the new name for the National Pension Saving Scheme), which is the National Employment Savings Trust (NEST). Presumably it's from the school of marketing that says you must have an acronym that means something. Anything.

If you really are interested in such things PADA has a doc on its website explaining why it went with NEST. It's here (PDF).

Person on the internetz is WRONG

Both ConservativeHome and Iain Dale had an emotional spasm at the end of December because of a Tweet by Sunny Hundal celebrating Rush Limbaugh's hospitalisation. Iain said:

I think this demonstrates a key difference between elements of the left and the rest of us. I can think of no left wing hate figure whose hospitalisation or death I would celebrate, either openly or secretly.

The funny thing is, I seemed to remember Iain Dale Twittering a comment from his partner about how the demonstrators at a G20 demo should be shot. He denied this, but look what I found in his Twitter archive today:

Just give the Police guns, and shoot the lot of them. That was my partners reaction to the riots in the City. Quite liberal of him really...
1:12 PM Apr 1st, 2009 from Twadget

And this was at the demo where Ian Tomlinson died unfortunately. Obviously it's a jokey comment, and it's not aimed at a specific lefty, but isn't the sentiment openly seeking the hospitlisation or death of people whose politics you don't like? Does it become OK if it is jokey? Or not about a specific person? If so why so?

Now personally I think we are all old enough to deal with offensive blogs, Tweets etc, and especially those who link to Guido shurely? But what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Bit hypocritical innit?

Mandy snippet 2

Having just spotted this post on S&M, how about this?:

At the same time we need to accept that the current structure of most public companies is better at rewarding enterprise in senior management or owners than it is at giving the bulk of the workforce an incentive to innovate or commit to the business. The evidence is that companies that share rewards with their employees, like the John Lewis Partnership, are also very good at pursuing long term growth strategies.

From the same speech I linked to last night.

Pensions blame game

A couple of posts on the decline of decdent pension provision that are worth a look. Calvin here, and Matthew Taylor here.

I disagree with Matthew's argument that unions are in part to blame for the collapse of DB, because they weren't willing to negotiate a partial retreat (though in the comments he says he's taking his cue from the lack reform of public sector schemes). I think most union pensions bods actually despair that they were unable to do more to mitigate the dismantling of DB by private sector employers. In reality the unions (for various reasons) were unable to put up much organised resistance.

Calvin meanwhile takes aim at the ACA's argument that public policy is to blame for the decline:

the plethora of reasons why quality schemes have been closed in recent years stacks so high that to pick out failures of public policy seems, by itself, to be somewhat perverse: in my view, reasons why company schemes are closing are little to do with public policy and more to do with companies exploiting a period of worker weakness to erode a vital (and admittedly costly, at the moment) part of employees’ terms and conditions of employment based on short-termist considerations and fuelled by accounting standards that are unsympathetic to the long-term nature of pensions provision. The tide of scheme closures, in the face of DWP attempts to deregulate provision, seems evident proof that the policy ‘failures’ lie less at the public level than the corporate one.

Likewise, any attempt by employers to use auto-enrolment to reduce their investment in pensions at the individual level, on the grounds that quto-enrolment will increase overall costs, needs to be seen not as a failure of public policy but a function of the same attack by employers on terms and conditions.

Not surprisingly this is much closer to my view of the world. I would only add that the really big factor in all of this is life expectancy. It is the thing that has really pushed costs up and it is also the factor that is not being adequately dealt with (which is where I reconnect with Matthew's perspective).

The private sector has not addressed the issue of longevity. It has simply passed the buck back onto the individual, whilst at the same time reducing its commitment. Moving from DB to DC does not.... err... affect how long people live. But it does affect who carries the risk, and how much they pay for it. Inb effect then, as Calvin suggests, the removal of DB is not much more than a deferred pay cut, affecting millions who don't realise it. It's as simple as that. And the Right's campaign to destroy DB in the public sector is nothing more than an argument for massive levelling down.