Like most British Columbians, I believe B.C. Ferries CEO David Hahn's income and pension are unjustifiable. Yet his $1,200,000 salary and potential $314,000 pension are modest compared to executive compensation in the private sector. A list compiled by the Vancouver Sun demonstrates the gains made by CEOs in B.C. firms in just one year. From 2009 to 2010, the compensation for the head of Fortress Paper went from $1,315,000 to $15,999,000. The head of Goldcorp Inc. went from $7,900,000 to $10,028,000. The head of Ivanhoe Mines went from $8,519,000 to $10,315,000. The long list demonstrates the nine-digit gains for many other B.C. CEOs, who were already receiving multimillion-dollar compensation packages (the top 100 earned an average of $3.54 million in 2010).
The big difference, critics will respond, is that Hahn's public sector package comes out of the taxpayers' pockets, whereas the free market measures and assigns a business executive's worth. In theory, it's a payday meritocracy in the financial food chain.
Yet it's not inflated public sector wages that are responsible for the massive shift in wealth upwards in the U.S. and Canada. It was corporate boards that approved massive stock options, rock star perks and Trumpsized wages for top executives, while ratcheting down the wages of employees. And for years, deregulation-crazed legislators and a captured press cheered on the process.
Locally, while the uproar over Hahn's compensation is justifiable, on another level it serves to ramp up the politics of envy, by connecting it to rhetoric about inflated public sector wages. If non-unionized wageslaves earn less, why should they support teachers, nurses, and civil servants who earn more? It's a great divide and conquer tactic, whether it's trotted out in the Lower Mainland or Madison, Wisconsin.
The corporate line that you have to "pay to retain talent" was already past its best-before date when it was used to justify the record bonuses paid out to Wall Street executives, soon after the crash of 2008. But even if Canadian execs have proved to be more responsible than American robber barons, can we honestly say any of them are worth 10 times or more than David Hahn? In the U.S. and Canada, the executive windfall has been engineered by transferring productivity gains up the corporate ladder. While the top moneymakers made out like bandits, wages of middleclass workers in real dollars have been stagnating since the late '70s.
The global game of class divisions is getting more extreme. The subprime Ponzi scheme crashed and burned after spreading its toxic assets all across the world. The debt was passed on to taxpayers from Ohio to Oslo, and now we're hearing calls for a fire sale of public sector assets, to settle accounts with the arsonists. (Although Canada was preserved from much of the fallout from the credit crunch, we have a leader in Ottawa who is ideologically disposed to slash and burn fiscal policies.)
Iceland, one of the temporary beneficiaries of the transnational Ponzi scheme, was among the first nations to face bankruptcy. The Icelanders still had some troublesome ideas about democracy however. They voted in a second referendum 93 percent against a debt restructuring deal, basically telling the banksters to go self-replicate. The game then moved on to Greece. The same day that hockey rioters laid waste to downtown Vancouver, tens of thousands of Greeks hit the streets of Athens, protesting an IMF-brokered austerity program that threatens to beggar them for years and turn over state assets, including Mediterranean islands, to private hands. The Greeks certainly had pre-existing troubles with public pensions and payouts, but like the Icelanders they are refusing to submit to debt slavery.
This game is far too complicated to outline in 700 words, but suffice it to say we're witnessing the handiwork of the global firm, Betrayal, Swindle, and Fraud. Its tentacles are encircling the postindustrial west, caressing public assets, while disguising its intentions with an inky cloud of verbiage about "debt ceilings," "fat cat" unions, and "out of control" public sector wages.
So by all means, grumble about David Hahn, and a Crown corporation that was restructured to run like a private operation by the Campbell government. Just remember the CEO of B.C. Ferries is a small fish in a big sea. Pay attention to species higher up the food chain.
www.geoffolson.com
