A few people, mostly men, have managed to get disproportionately rich in a globalising market and may now bend rules or move goals to make the rest of us pay (“The clash is no longer between left and right, but between a global financial elite and the rest of us”, Comment). As the ladders of wealth, income and power get steeper, the rungs get fewer and further apart. At the top sit the fabulous 0.001%. With such ample means and commanding overview, how would they not be realigning markets and moralities?
So far, so bad, but the headline over Robert Reich’s piece doesn’t square with his conclusions. When we confront the gulf “between a global financial elite and the rest of us”, we face a choice between “leftwing reform populism” and “rightwing authoritarian populism”. In such a fix, can there really be no clash between left and right?
Reich notes that both Britain and the US had brushes with authoritarian populism after the last great recession “but opted instead for reform” with Franklin D Roosevelt, Beveridge and Britain’s postwar Labour government.
The British reformers who beat the odds in the Labour victory of 1945 had warned in their manifesto against the sort of “hard-faced men” who did well out of war and might again “get the sort of peace that suited themselves” in social and economic policy thereafter. War, recession, immigrants, refugees – and now climate change. Roll on reform!
Greg Wilkinson
Swansea
Robert Reich’s article reflects the changes in employment, working hours, earnings and job security in the last 40 years. Its flaw is its concentration on the developed world. While the Euro-American workforce has suffered a contraction in its living standards, China, to name but one, has experienced an increase; the developing world’s improvement has come at the cost of the developed world’s loss.
The improvement in executive pay in the US and UK derives from the rise in productivity in the developed world. Are we in the west entitled to advocate that the developing world must remain deprived in order that the west can remain privileged?
Martin London
Denbighshire
North Wales
It is clear that the political and financial elite in whom most power is now concentrated are very clever at playing the rest of us off against each other, leaving themselves free from blame and able to pursue their goals without interference. Those who started to make their way in life in the 1960s are one easy target, supposedly having had it easy and now sucking the financial life out of today’s younger generation. Robert Reich makes it clear that greater distribution of corporate wealth in the 1960s and 1970s created the more equal opportunities that allowed all to prosper. Let’s stop blaming each other for our current predicaments and instead focus our energies on reversing the ever upward concentration of wealth and power.
Stuart Barry
Reading
Robert Reich points out that compensation packages of top executives of big companies in the US have soared “from an average of 20 times that of the typical worker 40 years ago to almost 300 times”. Given the symbolic violence the term “compensation package” inflicts on the English language it is time to call a halt to its use. To compensate means to give recognition of a loss, suffering or injury. It does not mean turning a blind eye to the process by which self-interested individuals are able to extract mega salaries and other benefits from fellow employees, shareholders and consumers.
Ivor Morgan
Lincoln
Conservatives always claim that pay is linked to effort and hard work. So on the basis of the latest pay ratio figures published by the High Pay Centre, does this mean Britain’s CEOs are working 183 times as hard as ordinary workers?
Pete Dorey
Bath, Somerset
