Qantas has been criticised for giving its CEO a wage of over $12 million, while offering its other staff a payrise which is less than inflation.

Retiring CEO Geoff Dixon 'earned' a wage package calculated at $12.2 million.

Shareholder and Australian Services Union representative Lisa Marshall said Qantas defended its executive salaries as a means to retain the best managers, while it offered its other staff a payrise of only three per cent in the last wage talks - less than the Consumer Price Index, which tracks increases in the costs of goods and services and is used to measure inflation.

"It's disgusting that you can keep continually raising your salaries, giving yourselves slaps on the back and yet it has never filtered down to the people underneath you," she said.

(Source: news.com.au)

 

The seventh Australian soldier has been killed in Afghanistan.

25-year-old army officer Michael Fussell, from Armidale, was on his first tour of duty in Afghanistan when he was killed by a bomb.

(Source: The Age)

 

Union bosses spent $80,000 on a luxury trip to London, paid for by a workers' redundancy fund.

Electrical Trades Union secretary Dean Mighell flew business class to London in 2006. He stayed in the Royal Garden Hotel, near Kensington Palace, together with other unionists and officials linked to the Protect fund.

The group spent than $27,000 on accommodation. At least $10,000 was spent on meals, drinks, valet service, the internet, in-house movies, the mini-bar and other items.

Former ETU state council member Vanessa Garbett said no written report of the trip was provided to council.

The trip was ostensibly a fact-finding mission into a scheme run in Britain, which the fund ended up not adopting.

Mr Mighell has criticised Prime Minister Kevin Rudd for being out of touch with workers.

(Source: news.com.au)

 

A British bank which is being bailed out with 20 billion pounds of taxpayers' money, is nonetheless preparing to pay bonuses to thousands of its investment bankers.

Royal Bank of Scotland has set aside 1.79 billion pounds to cover staff costs, including discretionary bonuses, at its investment banking division for the first six months of the year alone. The same division caused a 5.9 billion pound 'writedown' that wiped out the bank's profits for the same period.

In the US, six Wall Street banks - Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers - have set aside US$70 billion in pay and bonuses for the first nine months of the year.

Five are in line to benefit from a US$700 billion US taxpayer bail-out. The sixth, Lehman Brothers, has collapsed - though not without securing considerable bonus payouts for staff.

(Source: The Guardian [UK])

 

Members of a Victoria police unit "have been prepared to decide guilt without recourse to courts, mete out punishment to those they consider deserve it and lie on oath or turn a blind eye to protect themselves or their colleagues", according to the Office of Police Integrity.

In a report to State Parliament, OPI director Michael Strong also said some members of the armed offenders squad believed they were a "force within the force" and above the law.

The OPI secretly bugged an armed offenders squad interview room in 2006 and filmed members committing assaults.

Chief Commissioner Christine Nixon scrapped the elite squad within weeks of a July 2007 OPI raid on it.

Ex-squad members Robert Dabb, Mark Butterfield and Matthew Franc pleaded guilty to assault and to lying to the OPI director.

The report reveals the old armed offenders squad solved only 47 per cent of cases between July 2003 and September 2006 whereas the new armed crime taskforce has a clean-up rate of 80 per cent.

Police Association secretary designate Greg Davies said that 'only' three out of 35 members of the squad were dealt with in court, and described the rest of the squad as "hard-working, honest, solid performers."

(Source: Herald-Sun)

 

Declines in business confidence, the stock exchange, and demand and production have not effected corporate leaders' pay, according to new figures.

The survey by the National Australia Bank has found Australian companies' confidence has now slid for 10 months in a row. Last month's decline accelerated, though, with confidence moving 21 points to minus 29 from minus 8.4 in September. A negative reading indicates that pessimists outnumber optimists.

Australian companies are paring back production as orders decline at home and abroad. Alumina today became the latest firm to announce cut backs, with plans to reduce its aluminium output. Rio Tinto and Fortescue yesterday announced a reduction of about 10% in iron-ore production, in part because of slowing demand in China.

The Reserve Bank yesterday lowered its growth forecast to 1.5% in 2008-09 from its 2.25% forecast made in August. That estimate undercut the Rudd Government's own target of 2% announced last Wednesday.

Chief executives of the top 300 listed companies, however, 'earned' an average of $2.97 million in the year to June 2008. This is a small gain from $2.96 million, in a period when the S&P/ASX 200, an index of Australian stocks listed on the Australian Securities Exchange, shrank by 16.9%.

(source: The Age)