Boris Johnson appears to have singled out the advertising boss Sir Martin Sorrell, one of David Cameron’s closest corporate allies, over the gulf between the pay of corporate bosses and their employees.
In his speech to the Conservative party conference on Tuesday, the mayor of London said social ties would fray if the economic gap between citizens grew too big. He said FTSE 100 chief executives were paid about 25 times as much as their average employee in 1980, but the multiple is now 130 times.
He added: “And there are some gigantic self-appointed sequoias that pay themselves 780 times the salary of the little shrublets they employ.”
Sorrell, the chief executive of the advertising group WPP, is Britain’s best-paid chief executive, earning £42.97m last year. His £29.8m pay the year before was 780 times the £38,000 average earned by WPP employees, a report by the High Pay Commission found.
Johnson said workers would go along with high earnings if they thought the system was working for everyone and not skewed in favour of the rich.
“People will accept that but only on certain conditions: only if they feel this dynamic, entrepreneurial, high-reward capitalist system is helping to take everyone forward. We will accept it if and only if they pay their taxes – big corporations and rich individuals – and only if those firms pay their employees decently.”
Sorrell has supported the Conservatives’ economic policies for being pro-business, but he warned before the election that the prime minister’s pledge to hold a referendum over European Union membership was of deep concern to company bosses.
A spokesperson for Sorrell said: “Over 90% of Sir Martin Sorrell’s remuneration in 2014 was performance related with 84% being in shares for a period of substantial outperformance over five years when WPP’s value increased by over £10 billion to £17.8 billion. Sir Martin has overseen the growth of a business from scratch in 1986 to employing some 190,000 people globally now.”
