How much do you think an average salary is?
You’d think that those who run banks and work with money might at least have a basic grasp of what ordinary people are taking home.
After all, these people are in charge of the institutions that our wages are paid into and run the cashpoints we take our money out from. Surely you can’t be put in charge of a bank if you don’t understand what your customers are going through?
Unfortunately you can.
US banker Jes Staley – who started as the new boss at Barclays late last year – openly admits that he has no idea what the average UK salary is.
He didn’t even try and guess. He had no clue. Perhaps he doesn’t think it’s a concern for him. After all, Staley could be in line to earn £8.25m in a single year.
Eight years on from a banking crisis caused by self-proclaimed masters of the banking universe – a crisis that public sector workers are still being made to pay for – the out of touch and distant elite still don’t know how most people live.
For them, it was long ago back to business as usual.
That’s one reason why UNISON backs the Robin Hood Tax campaign, and believes it’s time to start taxing finance firms on the thousands of transactions they do every day.
Not only is this the right thing to do in terms of regulating the masters of the universe – but it’s also a crucial means of properly funding our much-needed public services.
A financial transactions tax levied on the banks would allow the sector that caused the crash to pay a greater share back to the society they damaged with their greed and recklessness.
And it would provide the funds to ensure that public services and the public servants who we rely upon so much – like NHS workers who received a measly one per cent pay offer this week – could begin to be properly funded again, at long last.
Oh – and the average UK salary is about £28,000. It’s not a huge amount of money, and it can be tough to get by on an average salary. It’s fair to say plenty of workers across the public and private sectors would be delighted to be paid the average UK wage.
And that’s 1/300th of what Jes Staley might pocket this year.