Equality Studies Dude
User for 27 days
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I like the idea, but I would suggest that it might be better to first push for EAPN's EU minimum adequate income (which is targeted at those not in work).
My reason for saying that is the detailsof the legal basis for the EPAN proposal show that any role in pay is specifically excluded from the remit of the EU by the Lisbon Treaty. Getting that changed would probably be harder than getting a directive through. That directive would, EAPN, argue, push the minimum wage up.
(Of course, I could be wrong, but it does seem to me that the Directive would be the easier to achieve.)
(See the link to the EAPN's documents on their proposed EU Directive over in my suggestion on this in Forum no. 4 on "Enhanced economic, social and cultural participation":
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Hi Mark Malone,
Could you put up more information on your point? I don't know enough about the issue or issues you're raising to be able to form a view. For example, are you saying that markets (of whatever type -- capitalist or non-capitalist) cannot work to reduce carbon production (and are therefore not only a waste of time for reducing carbon production but also just allow capitalists a new economic space to accumulate wealth), or that we should not apply *capitalist* markets to solve the problem.
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There is a part of me that dreads the thought of that. I just look at what Co Dublin County Councillors did with the power they had to rezone land before the law was tightened.
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I think this proposal is incorrectly placed in the structure of the Ideas. Income equality should not be just part of "Public sector renewal". It is needed in <i>all</i> companies and in the fees self-employed professionals can and do charge for services.
One of the reasons that Irish public sector high-level salaries are so high is that they have been explicitly linked to the salaries of senior executives in the private sector. They also need to be brought under control.
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There is a similar point in "Recasting Egalitarianism: New Rules for Communities, States and Markets" by the economists Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis (Verso, 1998). [Ostrom has a chapter in the book.] But I do think there is a huge task in even identifying ways of putting the "community" back into some of the significant and highly complex markets in the world in a way that is not simply swatted aside by free-riders in far away places and with little direct contact between me and them.
It is one thing to see a community of fishermen or farmers deal with a reasonably localised commons problem. It is going to be much harder -- if, indeed, possible -- to apply Ostrom's insights to the myriad of materials, processes and links that are needed to make the computer I am typing this comment on: the coltan from west Africa, silica from where-ever, copper, etc., combined with the software in the box on my table, the software on the server at my ISP, at the site Claiming Our Future has used to host this website; the hardware to get the signal from my house to the ISP, to the CoF host and back to where-ever you are reading this.
0 Use Elinor Ostrom's idea and blow away the Tragedy of the Commons myth - 12 days ago
I was reading a paper on restricting CEO pay last night, and in it a book by Graef Crystal is cited as tracing a ratio of 5 back to Plato; JP Morgan is cited in the paper as saying it should not be more than 20. The original manifesto from Is Feidir Linn (that led to the Claiming Our Future conference and coalition) proposed a ratio of 10.
[For the fellow nerds on this thread, are the references and links:
Dittmann, Maug and Zhang "Restricting CEO Pay", European Corporate Governance Institute Working Paper in Finance 291/2010; available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1660490 [be warned: (a) the maths gets hairy after the nice opening; (b) the paper concludes that (most ways of) limiting CEO pay would lead to *increases* in average CEO pay comapred to what they get now.]
Is Feidir Linn, 2010 "A vision for an inclusive, equal, sustainable Ireland" available at: http://www.communityplatform.ie/Final-Manifesto.pdf]
0 No one in a business should be allowed to earn more than ten times the earnings of the lowest paid. - 15 days ago
@ HardWorkingEejit
Part of the situation you describe is the well-known free-rider problem. As far as I know, that is an unsloved problem in existing systems. Why should alternatives be required to attain a higher standard
Why should a high-skilled -- which is a different point from hard working -- why should a highskilled and hardworking person get more than ten times the amount that a lowskilled and hardworking person?
As for your second point, yeah, we should go for it! For example, that would mean that a full-time shelf stacker in Marks and Spencers on Dublin's Grafton Street would have got a pay *rise* of stg£750,000. Cool by me. (Or, taking my tongue out of my cheek, why should a single worker in a company get a pay *rise* of £7.5 million?)
0 No one in a business should be allowed to earn more than ten times the earnings of the lowest paid. - 17 days ago
The underlying sentiment is excellent, but I think the specific point about the 10:1 ration in a (single) business would need to be examined more carefully. We already currently see increasing use of 'flexibility', outsourcing, so-called "self-employed" contractors, etc. It would be very easy to undermine the purpose of a 10:1 ratio limit by setting up a separate company for different activities -- outsourcing lower jobs so that the pay ratio for the top earners is not hampered by the presence of receptionists, secretaries, call centre agents, retail sales staff, etc.
0 No one in a business should be allowed to earn more than ten times the earnings of the lowest paid. - 20 days ago