Much of that has been swept away in favour of performance-related pay, bonuses and other supposedly market-sensitive methods of remuneration, a process that has widened the pay gap in Britain, damaging the social fabric in the process.
However, we've gotten better at highlighting the gender pay gap through various awareness initiatives (Equal Pay Day) and legal frameworks (CEDAW General Recommendation No.13: Equal remuneration for work of equal value).
We have been offered a couple of scapegoats to distract from the fact that the government has backed away from proper regulation of the banks, tougher rules to stop a cosy mutual remuneration club operating among top executives, and action to narrow the pay gap.
But a reform to the way remuneration committees operate would be a small step towards reducing the vast pay gap in Britain and injecting a little "fairness" into the corporate sector.
The CIPD said companies should publish their pay gap – US firms are required to do so from 2017 – and also allow employees to sit on their remuneration committees.
As the pay gap widens – chief executives in the UK took 60 times as much as the average worker in the 1990s and 180 times as much today – the uselessness ratio is going through the roof I propose a name for this phenomenon: klepto-remuneration.
"There is a pay gap, a problem to be fixed," Ipsa said, as it launched a public consultation in July on proposals to change MPs' remuneration.
And the third is that investors have too little influence over pay packages agreed behind closed doors by imperial chief executives and their cronies on boards' remuneration committees.That the gap between earnings at the top and bottom of the corporate ladder has grown is not in dispute.
According to stories from the time, it was his realization of the huge gap in remuneration (not to mention status) between this and other forms of figurative painting that encouraged him to take up figures.
For Britons, the most telling conclusion concerned the widening gap in remuneration between a handful of uber-bosses and the bulk of the work force — a gulf approaching Victorian dimensions and evoking their land's tangled relationship with greed, envy and achievement.
