idiocy on a grand scale

We all know how this works. BP is on the slide. Share price dropping like a cascade of dominos.  It’s not a good time to be in fossil fuels. China no longer buying; America fracking and the Middle Eastern countries pumping out more oil than you can shake a Sheik at. Even Saudi Arabia is feeling the pinch and trying to sell shares in its monopoly. The best thing a company that BP can do is sack worker [tick] and lower existing workers’ pay [tick] and water down any obligations that the company may have towards workers’ welfare such as pensions and sick pay [tick]. And if that doesn’t work first time, keep doing it until you can see the whites of the workers’ eyes. Plead poverty. Ask for a government bailout on that infrastructure you’ve already paid for and get a tax rebate to keep you competitive. Threaten even more job losses [tick].  Then appoint a new chief executive Bob Dudley.

What makes Bob that is a Dudley unusual is  the established formula of agreeing to everything the new chief executive demands, such as a £14 million starting salary was voted down. Wow. That’s Bolshevism for you. Some of the other executives in the top FTSE 100 companies average only a  salary of around £5 million a year. According to the High Pay Centre, they’ve got to make do with Exec poverty at around 183 times the earnings of the equally average UK worker. Average earnings in the UK being around £26 500 in 2015, but of course most folk I know don’t make average earnings, they make far less than that. But let’s just simply, picture your own average executive and pin his image to an internal dartboard [and it will be a he]. He makes 200 times the average worker. And Bob, this is a Dudley, makes almost three times as much as them.

What can super Bob do? Can he like Superman turn the earth back on its axis, regularly save the world, turn back time and save Lois Lane from a crumbling dam that has killed her and bring her back to life with a kiss? Temporarily blip. Like the stock market, she will recover.

I’m sure those angry shareholders were asking the question most workers face. Would Bob work for a measly £13 999 999? And if he would why not a measly £13 999 998?  £13 999 997?  You can see where it’s going. A downward pressure on Bob’s pay packet.

Perhaps shareholder could get Bob, who is a Dudley, to sign a workers’ agreement, or more a lame-duck promise, not to commit suicide, as all new global workers, such as those making smartphones and tablets for Apple’s subsidiary company Foxconn in China were forced to do, in 2010.   

Ignore signs such as those held up to information technology workers on Google buses there’s 10 million Dudley’s more like you in India. One of the picketer's placards being held by Thomas Piketty.

All wages are relative and Bob who is a Dudley is I’m sure worth more than the average worker.  But how much more? Let’s throw up some ideas. Offhand, how about 100 000 times more? The ratio of how many serfs the nobility owned in War and Peace. By the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, around 1989, the modern aristocracy of the Communist politburo has two houses and earned around six times as much as the average worker. Let’s just say it’s a changed world from the people that owned the land that also owned the people on the land, to modern commerce, but the principle is the same. Putin knows it. I’m the one holding the big stick. Like it or lump it. I’m sure Bob that’s not a Dudley knows it too.