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Inequality is high in almost all facets of life all around the world including in the industrialised countries. The poor are getting poorer while the rich get richer. This is demonstrated by the Gini Coefficient: an indicator that relate to differences in the share of national wealth captured by the poorest people. The United Nations Development Programme, in its 2005 Human Development Report titled International Cooperation at a Crossroads: Aid, Trade and Security in an Unequal World states that generally, Latin America and SubSaharan Africa record the highest levels of inequality. The former is at 57.1 while the latter at 72.2. Gini Coefficient is measured from 0 being the lowest level of inequality to 100 the highest. In Zimbabwe, its 56.8, Zambia 52.6, South Africa 57.7 and Namibia has the highest at 70.7 of the selected countries in the Southern African Development Community region.
In the industrialised countries, the United States’ inequality level is at 40.8 while Russia’s is at 31.0. According to the UNDP, distribution patterns have an important bearing on the relationship between average incomes and poverty levels. It is interesting that in several developing countries, the inequality gap has caused a rise in debt as companies put a squeeze on decent paying jobs and diminishing benefits. This has caused liqudity crunch and has caused a rise in household debt as families fail to make ends meet. For instance, British household debt hit 100 billion pounds in 2003, a figure many people were not comfortable with.
Against this background, a few individuals called Chief Executive Officers are meanwhile getting millions of dollars in compensation, never mind in several cases, their dismal performance. The Economist magazine defends them saying “the truth is most executives' pay is well-deserved—in the sense that shareholders are getting value for their money”. http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=8896880 (Background Article - The politics of pay, 22 March 2007).
Well, that is true because these executives introduce ruthless management decisions such as cutting down on permanent staff and replacing them with temporary staff whom they underpay and retrenching staff while increasing the workload of those remaining. The creation of a reserve labour force, as a result of massive retrenchments that have occurred around the world, depresses salaries and wages. Now CEOs are relocating jobs to areas where they pay rock bottom wages, in the process depriving their fellow citizens of jobs while at the same time exploiting those people where the production processes would have been established.
One also has to ask who are the “shareholders”? Mostly, they are institutional investors (the same big companies fuelling inequality and economic insecurity) and the same few filthy rich people who own almost everything. So it is the same boys club that controls these companies through complex cross ownership schemes. A tiny minority of shareholders who do not have an effective voice is, incidentally, the same people who are hurt by the policies of these companies. The word “shareholders” can be deceiving because it seems to suggest ordinary people when in fact it is the big corporations and the very rich and powerful.The articles below demonstrate how CEOs are rewarded handsomely while their employees and their families can bearly make it from one month to the next on straight cash and have to rely on expensive credit cards and other various debt schemes.
In the industrialised countries, the United States’ inequality level is at 40.8 while Russia’s is at 31.0. According to the UNDP, distribution patterns have an important bearing on the relationship between average incomes and poverty levels. It is interesting that in several developing countries, the inequality gap has caused a rise in debt as companies put a squeeze on decent paying jobs and diminishing benefits. This has caused liqudity crunch and has caused a rise in household debt as families fail to make ends meet. For instance, British household debt hit 100 billion pounds in 2003, a figure many people were not comfortable with.
Against this background, a few individuals called Chief Executive Officers are meanwhile getting millions of dollars in compensation, never mind in several cases, their dismal performance. The Economist magazine defends them saying “the truth is most executives' pay is well-deserved—in the sense that shareholders are getting value for their money”. http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=8896880 (Background Article - The politics of pay, 22 March 2007).
Well, that is true because these executives introduce ruthless management decisions such as cutting down on permanent staff and replacing them with temporary staff whom they underpay and retrenching staff while increasing the workload of those remaining. The creation of a reserve labour force, as a result of massive retrenchments that have occurred around the world, depresses salaries and wages. Now CEOs are relocating jobs to areas where they pay rock bottom wages, in the process depriving their fellow citizens of jobs while at the same time exploiting those people where the production processes would have been established.
One also has to ask who are the “shareholders”? Mostly, they are institutional investors (the same big companies fuelling inequality and economic insecurity) and the same few filthy rich people who own almost everything. So it is the same boys club that controls these companies through complex cross ownership schemes. A tiny minority of shareholders who do not have an effective voice is, incidentally, the same people who are hurt by the policies of these companies. The word “shareholders” can be deceiving because it seems to suggest ordinary people when in fact it is the big corporations and the very rich and powerful.The articles below demonstrate how CEOs are rewarded handsomely while their employees and their families can bearly make it from one month to the next on straight cash and have to rely on expensive credit cards and other various debt schemes.
Image courtesy of Toronto Star
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