While the economy teeters and public service cuts loom, bankers are still awarding themselves huge salaries and bonuses. If you’re as fed up about it as we are, here’s what to do:
1. Tell your bank you want them to change.
2. Change your bank.
We don’t think we can carry on like this. But we have the power to change it. Tell your bank to change today.
10 May 2010. New article in The Scotsman. Big High Street banks are not the only option.
View here.
Join the campaign today
A great piece in the Guardian weekly from Change Your Bank founder Ken Burnett. In it he talks about how completely unfair the current sustem is and how we all should change our banks by changing our banks.
You can read it here
Being with the Co-operative Bank I’d assumed they would have a sensible policy on pay and bonuses. However there’s no mention of this that I can find on their website, so who knows.
Will keep you posted.
The fact is, bonuses aren’t just wrong, they also got us where we are today. So why go back there? Read my recent blog post on why bonuses are counterproductive to successful business.
Banks that Behave Badly rely on the fact that most us will put up with almost anything before we switch to a better one. But it’s remarkably easy to switch accounts, and consumer organisations such as Which? believe that we won’t get better banks until we start voting with our money.
Ready to change your bank?
Read the Which? guide here, and the MoneySaving Expert guide here.
Government estimates are that 5,000 bankers will this year take home at least £1 million. RBS management has threatened to resign if the government stops them from paying out £1.5 billion in bonuses.
The banks just don’t get it. So I’m going to spell it out. It is just simply not fair that you should pay yourselves such excessive salaries when you contribute no more to society and the common good as the thousands of other people who are doing similarly dangerous, difficult and socially useful jobs.
Shareholders need to stand up and say that they’re not going to accept this culture and deliver more profit to the pension and insurance schemes that invest in these banks. But customers like you and I need to stand up to and say that we’re not going to give our business to those banks that are just out to deliver a nice fat cat salary for a selected group of individuals.
Last weekend was the 1 year anniversary of RBS being publically owned. To mark the occassion, leading organisations and individuals from civil society wrote to Alistair Darling asking him to transform RBS into the Royal Bank of Sustainability by ending it’s current investments in projects that will contribute to climate change.
Yesterday’s news that bankers are to be forced to reveal how many of their employees earn more than £1m a year can only be good for the public. So the Change Your Bank Campaign is today calling for other professions to also reveal how many of their employees earn more than £1million each year.
How many of the nation’s nurses are earning more than £1 million? How many surgeons? Or ambulance drivers? How many millionaire air traffic controllers are there? How many Police Chiefs earn more than £1 million? How many charity heads, teachers and social workers are now earning more than £1million?
We believe that it’s only fair that other professions should produce this information too, as it might lead to a better understanding among the public of just how unfair the current system is.
We need your support and help to make the campaign a success. This weekend – talk to your friends about Change your bank and about how you think the current system is completely unfair. Get them to go to the change your bank site and become a fan. Or tweet or blog about the issue.
We can get the banks to change, but only if we start to make some noise about it.
Thanks!
Dan Roberts in a recent Guardian article talks about the further bail out of the banks. Incredibly, they’re now getting even more public money than the “crisis” last year. Even more incredible when big bonuses had just been announced – though the government has tried to secure some meagre restrictions on these.
According to Dan, the whole thing has been a big mess, designed to save the government’s face:
Had the government had the courage to bite the bullet last autumn and admit that both banks were, in effect, fully nationalised, it is possible to envisage an alternative scenario. The improved trading conditions would have fed directly through to increased value for taxpayers (rather than leaking out to other investors). We would have avoided hundreds of millions in fees to the advisers who dreamt up all these convoluted schemes. And it would still have been possible to consider privatisating them both (ideally in smaller bits),l when conditions improved.Unfortunately, this would have flown in the face of Treasury orthodoxy that insists the stockmarket is the only judge of long-term value and reliable source of capital. Neither seem to be case at the moment, and instead, the taxpayer is paying a high price to preserve the fiction that British banking is back on its own two feet.
But the government’s solution won’t solve everything. There are still other banks that aren’t affected and are still paying out huge bonuses with a cavalier attitude, regardless of the what their customers think. The whole system needs a shake. And we are the ones to do it.
Vince Cable, the Lib Dem Shadow Chancellor, has written in today’s Guardian that he feels the problem with the banks won’t be solved until the underlying system is fixed.
The public currently sees bankers and their bonuses through a red mist. Punches are being thrown, like one-off windfall taxes on profits or bonuses, which may feel satisfying but don’t connect with the underlying problems. These relate to having a banking system where profit – and bonus – maximisation occurs on the back of state guarantees, for institutions that are deemed too big or important to fail. As long as the guarantees exist, the key issue becomes one of how best to make banks pay a fair fee for the privileges they enjoy.
In his article, Vince considers all the suggestions that have been made to attack banks and bankers for revenge. He concludes that none of these are really adequate at bringing about a real long-term solution. His suggestion is a measured response where banks pay for the privilege of the government-backed guarantee. But he recognises that this won’t be popular:
Such a considered approach is perhaps less emotionally satisfying than a high-profile penalty on banks or bonuses. I suspect anything short of hanging will not meet public expectations. But bashing bankers detracts from the issue at the heart of the banking crisis: the continuing, dangerous but – usually – profitable behaviour that enjoys implicit protection from the taxpayer. That protection is free for the banks and potentially ruinous for the rest of us. They should pay a proper price for it.
We agree, but we also think there’s another option open – consumer power. Banks are accountable to us through our customer. If we moved our money away into other banks that play fairer, then they’ll have to sit up and listen.
We need as many people as possible to tell banks that they have to change – or else.
