The big freeze - but not for the banks

More and more organisations are announcing pay freezes, in a desperate attempt to cut costs and preserve jobs. A quick search comes up with BA, bmi, Ford, Unilever, the BBC, Channel 4, DB Schenker (the UK’s largest rail freight company), and in the US Macy’s department store and senior management staff at the Whitehouse.

Some of these moves are receiving the support of unions, while others are not – unions at bmi, BA and Ford are not happy with the proposals and threatening action, and there will be much more news on these stories to come. In a TV interview at the end of last year David Frost Director General of the British Chambers of Commerce predicted that there would be salary cuts and pay freezes in an effort to prevent some of the hundreds of thousands of job cuts expected this year.

Small wonder then, that many people are finding it hard to take the news that there is a ‘Stampede by banks to beat bonus crackdown’ and to pay out millions in bonuses to their staff, before a threatened government crackdown that might prevent the banks that are receiving government insurance to underwrite toxic debt from paying ‘excessive remuneration’, according to the front page of yesterday’s Times.