How Hard Can a CEO Work?

The CEO of Telecom may be grumpy about the recent hits to her company's share price but she has more to be happy about in some areas than the average kiwi, much more.

Telecom CEO Theresa Gattung is apparently unhappy at the moment. Chairman Gattung is unhappy because the Labour government's telecommunications regulators have slapped her baby Telecom on the wrist for monopolistic practices and ordered it to open up 'its' network its competitors. I put the 'its' in brackets some as an obscure reference to the grizzly announcer at the beginning of Monty Python's Flying Circus but because the way it obtained this network - recently ungraded at the expense of the taxpayer - was tantamount to receiving stolen goods. Stolen from the public of Aotearoa that is.

According the recent edition of the Worker's Charter newspaper Chainman Gattung is paid in excess of $3 million dollars a year. Even if Theresa Gattung spent only 7 hours a week eating meals, 7 hour a week sleeping, took an 8 hour holiday each year and worked without breaks the rest of the time - 8000 hours a year - she would still be earning a whopping $375 an hour.

Don't believe me? Here's the figures:

24 hrs x 7 days = 168 hours/week
x 52 wks = 8736 hours/year
(7 x 52) + (7 x 52) + 8 = 736 hours (sleep, eat, holiday)
8736 hours/year - 736 hours (sleep, eat, holiday)
= 8000 hours/year
$3,000,000 / 8000 hours = $374/hr

On the front page of the same Workers Charter there was a cleaner, Rosa Feleniko who is paid $10.60 an hour. Note that the figures above put aside no time for going to the toilet. That means that even at the most ridiculously conservative estimate Chairman Gattung is paid more than 30 times more for an hour of sitting on the toilet than Rosa is paid for an hour of cleaning them. In fact she gets in an hour about what a solo mother on a benefit gets in a week to feed, clothe, house and care for her children. She gets about 300 times more in a year than the teacher who is responsible for educating those children.

How did our society come to this? What are we going to do about it? What can we do about it? These are important questions that everyone who cares about the future of this world needs to spend some time thinking about, talking to others about and doing something about.