Comment on Thames Water has given a 14% pay rise to its CEO and a 26% rise to its finance director
haywire7@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
They will run out of money altogether inside a year and cannot attract new investment at the moment.
They should not be paying any of the top level management at all, let alone paying them bonuses.
Nationalise the water, gas and electricity suppliers. Nationalise public transport, railways and buses especially. Sod shareholders and make the bloody things work properly and stay working.
LordOfLocksley@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I looked into this a bit, and nationalising the water companies is a sticky topic.
When Thatcher privatised them, the idea was the regular Joe would profit grim these companies when they did well, through share holdings. The issue was, the initial share price was much too high for the regular Joe to afford, which gave the opportunity to pension providers to buy much more stock, of said water companies.
Now if you nationalise said water companies, stock price would go to 0 and lots of pensions will get hit as well.
I fully agree that all those companies should be renationalised, I just don’t know how it can be done without tanking pensions.
UncleArthur@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Such shares would be a relatively small proportion of a pension company’s investment portfolio. This is the water companies’ argument and it, ahem, doesn’t hold water.
haywire7@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
The government would have to take the hit and substitute the shares for bonds of equal or greater value. They should never lose value at least going forward.