Monday 9 February 2009

No bonuses for failure

Sign the petition at www.giveupthebonus.co.uk, organised by John Prescott and the Go Fourth campaign. It had over 7000 signatures just now.


It's reported that the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), which received £20 billion of taxpayers' money, plans to pay out £1 billion of it in bonuses to bankers and traders.

This from a bank that last year posted losses of £28 billion.

We believe this is morally and economically outrageous and the bonuses should be stopped.

The taxpayer owns 68% of RBS so we are now ALL shareholders.

So as shareholders, we therefore call on the board of RBS to announce that their bankers and traders will receive NO bonus this year.

1 comment:

Mil said...

There is another side to this. I work for an organisation where 50 percent of the bonus depends on divisional performance (profits, that is), 50 percent on team and personal endeavour. Of the latter, 50 percent depends on what you do and 50 percent on how. Even where we have been scored as having met or exceeded our team and personal targets, and even when we talk about the how (that is to say, qualitative not quantitative factors), this year we will be receiving nothing. Our own fault for not having pushed for higher basic pensionable wages earlier? Maybe so. But not everyone who works in the financial services industry earns the kind of bonuses that the kind of headlining which is currently going on in the media leads most ordinary people to conclude is the case. If you really want to campaign against bonuses and you want to be inclusive in your campaign, do it across the board (Civil Service, local authorities, private and public industries of all kinds) and make higher basic pay the focus of your campaign. Don't simply argue about the need to remove. Be positive and fight for the importance of adding to the world. And remember - some of us who receive bonuses earn rather less than you might expect, even in a good year. Which, as you can see from the above, at least for my colleagues and myself, is not the case this year.