What SA's top IT executives earn

[technofool]

This was a great post, almost every point is a half-truth. These spin skills must have stood you in good stead in your corporate life, an essential ingredient of the Teflon coated corporate body armour.

First you want to fight human nature. Next you want to fight the basic economics of supply and demand.

Half-truth: No more than you do, you expressed outrage at the greedy nature of the KZN MEC and a willingness to fight that human nature.

If less and less people chose to become shelf packers, or nurses or teachers or whatever, there will be a skills shortage in those sectors. If there is a skills shortage, salaries will rise. Economics 101.

You don't raise the base of a mountain by chopping off the summit.

Half-truth: That is your opinion but reality is different. We have had a flood of skills from the nursing and teaching professions and the salaries are still bitterly inadequate. Teachers and nurses are not happy. Economics 101 is not working in the real world.

To right all the social ills in your post, and to correct the deep imbalances that exist you need effective, efficient and compassionate government.

Hallelujah! This is true.

And for any kind of government to succeed, you need a private sector that is generating the nation's wealth so that you can tax the crap out of it.

The more that people are earning, no matter who they are, the better it is for all of us.

Half-truth: It is the spread of the earnings that matters. If 10% of the population earn 90% of the money and the rest of the citizens suffer in relative poverty, that is inhumane.

It's fine for you guys to make a "moral stand" against the status quo but you offer no viable alternative. It is very easy to criticise what is, not so easy to propose a solution.

I'm still one step ahead of you because I at least see that there is a problem. And I do have some ideas on how to make things better. 1200+ views of this thread and I hope I am winning over the hearts and minds of the readers to my side of the argument. That is the first step of my solution.

Here is the solution: Punish anti-social behaviour.

Greed is not good. It is harmful like violence, racism, exploitation and should be punished. As parents we teach our children to share and not to bully their friends but when it comes to leaders and captains of industry we are impressed by their obscenely ostentatious lifestyles facilitated by their unbridled greed.

Your morals are not my morals, and my morals are not your morals. Imposing your morals on me or anyone else is much more akin to the modus operandi of the white supremacist, whose regimes were anything but laissez faire. They were the complete antithesis.

You are right, my morals still allow me to feel compassion for the suffering of others. I only want to reign in human greed in the way we already try to limit anger, violence and other anti-social behaviour. Rampant greed is harmful to society and should be controlled. Just ask the people living in cardboard shacks and washing their bodies with a facecloth while standing in a plastic basin at 4:30am on a winter’s morning.

A society doesn't operate on morals. It operates on a set of rules which we must all obey whether they are aligned with our moral values or not.

Half-truth: Of course a society runs on morals. It operates on a set of rules which uphold our democratically accepted morals. So much for you accusing me of forcing my morals on you, you acknowledge that society requires us to submit to laws even if they conflict with our personal choice of morality.

So propose some law changes. If you can come up with a rule book that rights all the perceived ills enumerated in your posts and yet does not impose arbitrary restraints on our individual freedoms of action, association or choice; while protecting the means of production and while facilitating and incentivising the generation of wealth, then I'll congratulate you. Damn it, I'll even nominate you for the Nobel Economics Prize!

Until then, cry me a river.

We have an adequate set of laws that protect our individual freedom, all we need to do is drop this American idea that greed is good.

I see your last post of the evening was after midnight and your first post was before sunrise this morning. You certainly retain your corporate characteristics and with your callous attitude you must have been very successful in the corporate jungle. A little ad hominem, I know, but I am not about to cry you a river, sorry.

 

[technofool]

The way I see it, government greed and corruption looks like Little House on Prairie compared with Big Business. The oligopolies, the price fixing, bribery, the greed, the lying, the cheating, the con artistry, the dirty tactics, the environmental crimes, ... they lead the way for government.

In the old days you couldn't criticize government because they were ordained by God, nowadays you can't criticise corporate greed because they've got Adam Smith on their side. Every time you do that, you get the free market bible thrown at you. Please, someone show me a free market, somewhere, anywhere, ever, on this planet, outside of Adam Smith's social contract theory construction. There is no such thing, never was, never will be. The playing field is not level, and I don't care if the position is now open to anyone who works hard and shows talent. It's not about the individual but the position which commands such obsequious pay and wields such unbridled power. If you want to talk about market mechanisms here, how's about this one: the tug-o-war rope. Pulling on the one end we have our teachers, doctors police, domestic workers, petrol attendants, miners, factory workers, etc while pulling at the other end we have the Big Business Gravy Train. Sure, the field is perhaps level from the point of view that some individuals may change sides, but how does that make the game fair?

Gatecrasher's appeal to the Free Market is like the white supremacist 's appeal to the "survival of the fittest" principle. Both appeals are to a supposed natural mechanism and both are an attempt to escape the ethical imperatives. This debate can and must be conducted on moral grounds. Natural mechanisms are merely one factor among many to be considered.

Technofool, wasn't there something you posted a while ago which contrasted the CEO-worker salaries of today with those of a few decades ago? It will be interesting to bring that to this debate.

Yes this situation has gone into runaway mode. 1990 CEO = 85xworker pay, 1999 CEO = 419xworker pay (USA reference). In 2008 our CEOs got R5 000 000, our workers got R5 000 ???? 1000:1 maybe 500:1

Here’s a horrible thought. If we collect the global population into well chosen groups of 50 people and strip the richest person in each group of his wealth the other 49 in his group will double their wealth. Just think about going to your next big gathering (rugby game, rock concert, prayer day) there is one guy in the 49 people around you who has more wealth than all the other 49 around you put together. (World reference) Imagine that you are *that* guy listening to the other 49 debating whether they should take everything you own. 49 against 1, I don't like those odds, I have a feeling I know which way the vote will go. No wonder the wealthy are terrified!

There's another one: the appeal to human nature. Duh! (Sorry I'm just rude by nature.) Really, I don't get it. It's like justifying walking on the floor by an appeal to gravity. Who's arguing with human nature here? I'm not interested in why you walk on the floor, but in where you go and what you do, in other words, what you do with your human nature. I don't care how selfish and greedy you might be (if those are the qualities you believe to sum up human nature), as long as you do the right thing. In the end, that is what the debate must come down to and I agree wholeheartedly with Technofool in his taking a moral stand.

Yes you have noticed the subtlety that Gatecrasher was letting me get away with. When I say greed I don’t care about the quality in your head, I care about all your actions that are motivated by that greedy nature.

Lets get an answer to what I think is his best question so far: How does Sean Summers justify his 168m to a couple of thousand workers fighting for just R50 more? Can he actually explain to us how it's for the best? Or even better, how he deserves it? I have my doubts. He's going to appeal to human nature, to market forces ... in the end we always just get slapped in the face by Adam Smith's invisible hand.

Yes this is the R168million question. I would love to see it answered by Sean or any of the other members of the TopSnout Club.
That said you don’t get into the TopSnout club by being a putz. Just ask Glenn Agliotti, Jackie Selebi, Brett Kebble and countless other captains of industry trying to elbow open a spot at the trough.

Even JZ was saddled up and ridden like a rented pony the little Shabir jockey.

 

[klasvaakie]

Interesting point...the CEO of Neotel didnt even make the list...I smell coverup

 

[Fuma]

I don't know how recent this is coz Mavuso Msimang (SITA CEO) has left SITA like 2 years ago? He's the Dept of Home Affairs DG or something like that.

 

[aalwees]

Here's and intersting extract from a recent Daily Reckonning (Thursday, October 8, 2009):

"Now for the news, from The 5 Min. Forecast:
"The credit crisis has forged an even larger gap between the rich and poor, though it might not last for long," writes Ian Mathias in today's issue of The 5. "The richest 10% of Americans made at least $138,000 each this year, according to Census data released last week. That's a record high 11.4 times the average income for the opposite end of the spectrum: the poverty line around $12,000. Pre-crisis multiples were closer to 11.2.

"The middle class is getting credit crunched too. The median household income has fallen $1,860 over the last year - wiping out a decade of slow gains - to $50,303.

"But if history is any guide, this trend may be near its peak. At present, about a quarter of America's total income is earned by 1% of its population (amazing, eh?). That level has only been attained once in US history - ironically, 1928, right around the start of the last economic depression. What followed then was a 50-year trend in the other direction.

Graph: US Income Inequality

"We suspect history will rhyme this time around, if not flat out repeat... Between Wall Street, Washington and even Hollywood, it's open season on the über-rich."

 

[JerryMungo]

Craig Venter Altech CEO R 10 114 000
Robert Venter Altron CEO R 10 084 000

Brett Levy Blue Label Telecoms CEO R 6 160 000
Mark Levy Blue Label Telecoms CEO R 6 160 000

Gotta love the nepotism out there