This is not just a fashion statement, though the Mao style cap is not likely to endear Corbyn to Middle England or improve his electoral chances. It also refers to his idea of a wage cap at somewhere between his own salary (137k) and 50m. He sensibly backed away from that idea as the day went on yesterday, but unfortunately has tarnished the whole idea of dealing with excessively high pay with his ill thought out plan. Excessive pay is an important issue, but the key point is that it is excessive, not that it is high.
He gave footballers’ high pay as an example, but footballers’ high pay is a very poor example. Footballers are talented, and are paid a lot because their talent is in demand. Their ability is broadly measurable and certainly observable, even though there may be some disagreements about the contributions that players make, and clubs compete for their services in the open market. In general they are highly trained, have committed their whole lives to honing their specific skills, and are competing in an extremely competitive market. Pay is high, but reflects both high demand for their services and the very low probability of being successful.
Compare this with the chief executive of a large public company. The skills required are more amorphous. Leadership, strategic thinking, man management, and ruthlessness may all be required, but it is very hard to quantify whether CEOs are making a difference. If their companies are outperforming in their sector it may be a partial guide, but that may be because of their workers or company specific factors unrelated to them. Nevertheless, it’s necessary to measure performance in some way, and the company’s performance is a better guide to CEO performance than most, because the CEO’s objective should presumably be to maximise shareholder value (subject to some constraints of acceptable behaviour). Other employees can no doubt have more specific objectives, but for CEOs the bottom line should be the…er….bottom line.
But the argument many give for paying CEOs of large companies big salaries is that the larger the company, the greater the potential for the CEO to add value. If a CEO makes a decision that raises revenue by 1% it makes a difference of 100m for a company with 1obn in annual revenue, but only 10m for a company with 1bn in annual revenue. But this cuts both ways. If the company underperforms by 1% the CEO will be losing the company more money the larger the company is. This suggests that larger companies’ CEO salaries should be more volatile. Potentially larger but more dependent on performance. But you don’t see too many pay deals where the CEO has to pay the company money, so any deal has to accept that the CEO gets a basic salary that can only be increased by the bonus. On this logic, surely the larger the company the lower the CEO’s basic salary should be and the higher the gearing to performance.
Anyway, this is the sort of detail that Mr Corbyn didn’t seem to consider before jumping into the debate with both feet. A salary cap is precisely the wrong way of going about things, as it would just mean a lot of underperforming CEOs earning a lot of money regardless of performance. Admittedly this is not very different from the current situation, but with lower salaries, given the general lack of sensitivity of CEO salaries to performance. In that sense Corbyn is right in recognising there is a problem, but his solution was initially ill thought out, and subsequent attempts at a more sensible presentation of ideas have been tarnished by his initial floundering.
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