Thames Water's CEO has a $1.5 million pay package which is lower than CEOs of corporations of the same size. The funding for public unions in the UK is $233 billion. Great comparison there.
> The funding for public unions in the UK is $233 billion
That’s a pretty amazing figure, how was that calculated?
Are you seriously arguing that that the Thames Water CEO was underpaid? They have been mismanaged extraordinarily. Their debts, losses, costs, service and environment records are so poor that nationalisation is being discussed. They have been paying dividends and bonuses throughout.
CEOs of corporations of the same size quite often have to find and retain customers in competitive markets - which is hardly the case with Thames Water?
What is your point? $1.5 million is used to attract a CEO who can manage a large corporation. That is less than many players on second tier English clubs who are riding the pine. That is a rounding error when considering $233 billion paid to unions.
Yes they do, from rival businesses, superior and new technology, just look at Chat-GPT potentially putting programmers out of work, or telegrams being made redundant by pagers, and text messages and email.
@arethuza
>CEOs of corporations of the same size quite often have to find and retain customers in competitive markets - which is hardly the case with Thames Water?
Water companies are delivering a minimum standard of water, call it the least toxic form of water considering the energy constraints and logistics of delivering water en-masse compared to other methods of obtaining water.
Mains water from a very young age always made me sick, so where possible I use bottled spring water in the kettle, but am currently considering a reverse osmosis water filter, to deionise the water in the house as much as possible.
Deionised water is the best tasting, sweetest tasting water I've ever experienced, and if I listened to the medical experts I should be dead on numerous counts of their assertations. So two fingers up to them as well! LOL
I don't think you understand what these companies do if you believe Thames Water is in competition with Evian or Brita. Remember they're not just providing drinking water but handling the treatment, recirculation and safe disposal of wastewater too. So in addition to having inadequate fresh water storage for some parts of England and cutting back maintenance to the extent that they lose an enormous amount in leaks, one of the bigger problems is how they're failing to adequately dispose of wastewater. As a consequence of this there are some rivers, lakes and beaches in England + Wales that are now unsafe but which weren't before they were privatised.
In the examples here, no, CEOs don’t face real competition. Water companies are sold off public utilities. They way they make profit is to degrade service and raise prices. No one is going to install a competing water system. No AI is going to do that anytime soon.
The Economist has a political bent, but they are clear on how privatisation has gone: ‘Dogmatic adherence to privatisation in the face of its sustained failure suggests ideology, not pragmatism, was the motivation.’
> Water companies are delivering a minimum standard of water
No they aren’t. That’s a key point in the article.
I'm in Scotland so I have perfectly pleasant tasting water from the state-owned Scottish Water whose CEO get paid a small fraction of what the Thames Water CEO gets paid (~£295K plus
bonus).
"Paid to unions"? Do you mean paid to staff who might be members of unions? And if so why you are comparing money paid to a specific company to money paid to union members across the entire public sector?
I don't think you want to point at English football clubs if we're talking about sensible compensation, not least since one of the issues highlighted in the article are the debt load of these English and Welsh water companies.