Sitting in an adjournment during pay talks with an employer recently, colleagues began speculating about the salaries of the managers on the other side of the table.
As the estimates ballooned from the high end of five figures to generous six-figure numbers, one of the union team blurted out the time-honoured complaint of the under-valued worker - "I must be in the wrong business".
It echoed a comment from an American union colleague, some of whose Hollywood members genuinely earn six-figure pay cheques. His complaint was not that he was in the wrong business, but "in the wrong bit of the business". Trade union officials, even American ones, tend not to retire to mansions in the sun.
Apart from pay negotiations, the "wrong business" complaint tends to surface whenever bills arrive from plumbers, electricians, fridge repair operatives, and a host of others. After calculating their hourly rates, and noting that the call-out charge alone is sometimes more than people in our industries earn in a day, and you begin to understand why we so often feel undervalued.
Without knocking Britain's tradespeople - once called the cream of the working class - they have the luxury of learning a skill once, and can then get on with earning a living. Many of our members, whether operating the latest auto projection systems in cinemas, or grappling with the latest digital movie cameras, face such a rapid rate of technical change that they have to completely re-skill themselves every five to ten years. Yet they are often on pay rates that wouldn't tempt your average plumber out of bed.
Low pay of course isn't a problem in the finance industry and commerce, where, despite chaos in the pensions sector, 2002 ended with the traditional fat bonuses being paid to advisors who didn't see the crash in shares coming, and equally generous options payments to company executives who helped share prices to slide as far as they did.
During the year Vodafone gave its chief executive £2m in shares, despite losing more money than any other company in UK history, Telewest handed its CEO a £186,000 handout despite a 99% drop in its share price over five years, and drugs giant GlaxoSmithKline only backed off a £5.5m bonus for its boss, despite indifferent trading figures, when shareholders staged a revolt. If that's the price of failure how much does success cost?
In the finance sector the picture was the same - many traders' and analysts' bonuses were down due to the economic slowdown, but the city slickers managed to pocket five, six, and even seven figure sums and didn't have to end the year worrying about their pensions...unlike the rest of us.
During the last year 84 company pension schemes closed to new members, leaving thousands of workers in the cold, and often raising questions about their ability to pay those who are lucky enough still to be in them. The government's green paper, published last month, seems to be having little effect on the relentless round of scheme closures that continues apace.
Allowing people to work beyond 65 without affecting their pension rights, and tidying up the tax regime - two key proposals from the Department for Work and Pensions - hardly deal with the problems that have prompted so many schemes to close. Admittedly DWP can't wave a wand to bump up flagging share prices, but the government could make a move to reverse the changes it made to Advance Corporation Tax, and insist that the FRS17 accounting standard should be modified.
These aren't the only reasons that the pensions business is in crisis - for example the Minimum Funding Reqirement (MFR), introduced to protect pensioners against another Maxwell scandal, is widely regarded as a disaster, and the government is at least planning to change it.
As for the gaping hole in most funds, partly due to companies taking so-called pension holidays, the finance industry has a lot to answer for because of the advice it gave out at the height of the stockmarket boom.
You may have noticed last month that the GMB union was branded hypocritical for condemning pension holidays while nursing a massive deficit in its own fund. Unfair - the GMB did exactly the same as many other organisations running pension schemes, including BECTU: it listened to its financial advisers, and reduced (but didn't cut off) payments into the fund. The resulting £19m shortfall is entirely due to the failure of the finance community to predict the massive share slide that began three years ago.
Actually it isn't BECTU's members who are in the wrong business - it's the city wheelers and dealers on fat salaries who should change. A move into hemp weaving would be ideal, given that many seem to have built careers on selling old rope.
Tony Lennon
February 2003
