For a growing portion of the UK population, already over 2 million, and in countries like Spain where the proportion of population who may lose their job is expected to rise to 20%, one job is all they want and need.
Many would argue that having more than one job means that you cannot put enough time and effort into any one of the jobs in order to make a difference. If nothing else, it will mean changing focus and juggling time - which are never easy things to do. I would personally look at the raft of people who are serving multiple Boards as Non-Executive Directors (NXDs) and then hold down real jobs as being prime examples. I strongly believe we are in the mess we are today over things like pathetic watchdogs who just do the Government's bidding and have no bite of their own and the mess over Fred Goodwin's pension which still rumbles on having been negotiated by puppy dog NXDs. Again, from my own experience, I have yet to work with an NXD at a company who has made a single bit of sustainable difference to the company in terms of contributing effort and nearly all were reasonably well known.
So today we have Lord Levy talking about why Tony Blair should step down as Middle East Envoy as he has not the time to focus, the tools to do the job and, I think he hints at, the heart to focus on it. In my opinion, it is not a job you can play at as it affects the lives of thousands of disgruntled people and to give it a small percentage of your time a) shows you have no idea of the enormity of the situation and b) degrades the importance of humans.
But Tony has his snout deep in the trough of making money from his time as Prime Minister and he is not about to listen to people who let him down - friend or no friend.
Multiple Jobs And One Focus
I have blogged on this before. Many people who get to a certain level in industry join the gravy train that is multiple NXD and watchdog or quango jobs. After years proving that if they focus on one thing and be ultra successful, they suddenly believe that they can handle multiple roles and still be successful. Of course, in the world of NXDs there is no requirement to be successful as you are not measured on the success of the company. In the aftermath of the banking fiasco, hardly a single NXD has been blamed for the failed business model that led to a £1.3 trillion total bail out.
Tony Blair has many jobs. He is an NXD or Special Adviser to JP Morgan at £2.5m a year, the same at Zurich Financial £2m per year, he has a faith foundation, has £4.5m in advances for his memoirs which he is busy making up, and he is earning nicely on the after dinner speech circuit - at the height of the crisis in Gaza he was giving 90 minutes of his wisdom to drunken telecom executives in Barcelona for £240,000.
Lord Levy is right, for all his dodgy tax past and loans for peerages scandals, Blair is too busy making money to care one jot and do anything for the crisis in the Middle East and he is also one of the last equipped people in the world to advise having been party to starting a war in the region for wholly illegal reasons.
Besides, Tony, wake up and smell the coffee, for the effort you have to put in, there is no financial reward at the end of it - that just would not do while you are on the high speed gravy train to riches you think you deserve.
Pensions And Pensions
The full horror story of Fred Goodwin's pension saga is beginning to unravel. Under the Defined Benefits Scheme at RBS, Sir Fred would have been entitled for his length of service, age and the fact he was taking early retirement, to a great deal less than £703,000 per year he is getting. However, between he and his nice NXDs, Sir Tom McKillip and Bob Scott who were charged by the Government to negotiate Fred's settlement, they managed to bump up his fund to the equivalent of not just full service but add in all his bonuses as earnings too plus the ability to claim it for life from the age of just 50. Anyone else at RBS or other Defined Benefits schemes will know that the basis of pension benefit calculations is basic salary only. Goodwin even had the bare-faced gall to tell the Treasury Committee he was on the same sceheme as everyone else at RBS. I would love to see just one bank teller taking 'early retirement' get a deal on their pension calculated the same way.
Having lost billions of pounds and exposed the taxpayer to billions in liabilities for toxic debts of magnitudes far beyond our imagination, Fred Goodwin has been allowed to walk away with a great deal more than he was legally entitled thanks to the ineptitude of Government Ministers whose responsibility it was to get this right and make sure failure was not rewarded - now the same people are scrambling to be seen trying to correct this after the event.
At the same time we see the effects of Quantitative Easing (QE), the process of printing more money to inject £150bn into the economy to trigger us to spend more. The process has the initial effect of devaluing money already in circulation, although many would argue this is not a great effect. But, it has far greater effect on the long term worth of your money. This QE has a big effect on the debt market.
Pension funds depend greatly on the interest rates on Government debt and the deficits on pension funds widen as interest rates lower. Rates dropped at a great rate this week on the introduction of QE and this means there are greater deficits in pension funds - to the tune of £100bn in one week. The deficit in company final pension schemes is now estimated at £390bn - or more than £150,000 for every final salary scheme.
So it sharpens the thought process when looking at Government incompetence which allowed Goodwin to walk away with almost double his pension entitlement on a final salary scheme and then see them create an even wider pension deficit by introducing QE which increased the deficits of all final pension scheme funds. It means the cost of servicing Fred's pension just went up for the taxpayer who pays his pension.
Nice one, Gordon and the rest of the inept team.
'Slugger Cable'
I still have to look hard to find out what Nick Clegg does or if he exists as the only person at the Lib Dem Party who is regularly visible and commenting is Vince Cable - I still think he is the actual leader. No matter, this week he made an interesting analogy in a speech to his Party, likening this Government to the Bad Bank concept to deal with toxic debts. The moral mandate to govern has been lost, he claims, and the Government seems bankrupt of any ideas to get us out of the fiasco we are in and so their moral stock has become toxic and Labour is the Bad Bank of failed policy.
Very nice - I wish I had thought of that one.
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