Elites Will ‘Consider Inequality’

With no acute crisis on the radar, this year’s Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) will move away from the response mode of the past years and “look for solutions for the really fundamental issues,” its founder Klaus Schwab said at the pre-meeting press conference.

“We cannot afford to allow the next era of globalisation to create as many risks and inequities as it does opportunities,” Schwab wrote in a blog post a few days earlier. “Today we face a situation where the number of potential flashpoints are many and are likely to grow.”

Even Schwab and his organisation have finally realised that globalisation has increased global inequality and that its consequences have not been managed and mitigated well on the global level.

According to Schwab, the WEF is the “biggest assembly of political, business and civil society leaders in the world.” For decades, he has been gathering the world’s richest and most powerful people and companies once a year in the mountain resort of Davos under the banner of “improving the state of the world”.

This year, the annual meeting beginning Wednesday takes place for the 44^th time. Schwab welcomes around 2,500 participants, among them more than half of the CEOs of the 1,000 largest companies of the world, over 30 heads of state, and numerous leaders of international institutions.

A report published by the WEF has spoken of widening income disparities. The report states that increasing inequality impacts social stability within countries and threatens security on a global scale.

“It’s essential that we devise innovative solutions to the causes and consequences of a world becoming ever more unequal,” its authors wrote.

With a well-timed report, the renowned aid and development charity Oxfam International picked the issue up this week. According to Oxfam, the world’s richest 85 people own the wealth of half of the world’s population – a fact that the charity’s executive director Winnie Byanyima called staggering.

“We cannot hope to win the fight against poverty without tackling inequality,” she said. Oxfam locates the roots of the widening gap in fiscal deregulation, tax havens and secrecy, anti-competitive business practice, lower tax rates on high incomes and investments and cuts or underinvestment in public services for the majority.

According to Oxfam, the richest individuals and companies hide trillions of dollars in tax havens around the world. “In Africa”, the report says, “global corporations – particularly those in extractive industries – exploit their influence to avoid taxes and royalties, reducing the resources available to governments to fight poverty.”

Over the last years, tax avoidance has become a major focus of non-governmental organisations especially in countries like Switzerland, where some of the world’s biggest companies involved in raw materials mining and trade have their headquarters.

“Tax avoidance and harmful tax incentives are strongly linked with inequality,” said Martin Hojsik, tax campaign manager of ActionAid International, an international coalition fighting poverty across the globe.

“With a lack of revenue caused by tax dodging, developing countries in particular have very little resources to finance essential services like education and health care,” he told IPS.

ActionAid doesn’t participate at the WEF, which Hojsik calls a talking shop for elites in a fancy resort. “Real progress requires commitment from governments and processes that are inclusive of all stakeholders including people living in poverty,” he said.

Hojsik has no illusions about Davos: “This year, Deloitte, a company among other things advising companies how to avoid taxes when investing in Africa, is tweeting about income disparity on their #DeloitteDavosLife event, clearly showing some of the absurdity.”

Unlike ActionAid, Oxfam will take part at the global leaders’ meeting. The charity is asking participants to pledge to supporting progressive taxation, to making public all the investments in companies and trusts, to demanding a living wage in their companies and to challenging governments to use tax revenue to provide universal healthcare, education and social protection for citizens.

Oxfam’s effort is doomed to fail. A look at the WEF’s more than 260 sessions shows that hot potatoes like tax avoidance won’t be addressed. Even though there is a workshop specifically on the extractive industry, it aims only to discuss how the industry may drive growth in the future in the light of rising concerns over scarcity and environmental deprivation.

Hardly any of the workshops scheduled specifically address developing countries. There’s a session on the post-2015 development goals, however. It asks how a new spirit of solidarity, cooperation and mutual accountability may carry those goals from vision to action.

Peter Niggli, director of Alliance Sud, an alliance of the six biggest Swiss charities, isn’t attracted by such debates. Alliance Sud doesn’t go to Davos.

“We lobby at the Swiss government which makes more sense,” he told IPS. As a discussion forum, the WEF in Niggli’s opinion doesn’t have any influence at all on defining the post-2015 development agenda.

Niggli said that it is in any case not the WEF’s official programme with all the debates and workshops that draws businessmen and politicians, but the opportunity they have to meet others informally or set up new projects behind closed doors.

Surely it also isn’t the fake refugee camp the WEF has set up in Davos that draws the global elite. “We are simulating the experience of a Syrian refugee in a Jordanian refugee camp,” Schwab said. “It is so important that people can really imagine what it means to be a refugee.”

The United Nations Refugee Agency has appealed for 6.5 billion dollars for Syrian refugees. International donors have pledged 2.4 billion dollars so far. If the WEF is serious about “improving the state of the world”, its wealthy members could come up with the lacking sum.

This report was first published here by IPS Inter Press Service. 

Swiss Knife Sharpened to Cut Bosses’ Pay

Swiss voters will decide Nov. 24 on introducing a salary cap that would limit the wage spread in companies to 1:12. The economic lobby is nervous – success for the proposal in the referendum is not as unrealistic as once expected.

It wasn’t just the smallholders in the Swiss multinational pharmaceutical company Novartis who were disgusted by a 79-million-dollar farewell package to resigning CEO Daniel Vasella earlier this year. Public outrage was huge.

Two weeks later, Swiss citizens sent a clear message to executives that their increasingly excessive salaries and bonuses would not be tolerated: 68 percent of voters supported the “fat cat initiative” which promised to curb salary excesses and to ban big payouts.

That referendum was more about strengthening shareholder democracy. Once the initiative is fully implemented, shareholders of Swiss companies will have a veto right on payments to executives. Within a one-share-one-vote frame however, concerned shareholders usually get outvoted by large investors.

“The fat cat initiative includes some good aspects. However, it neither helps much in limiting big salaries, nor in providing a solution to unequal income distribution,” argues David Roth, president of the Swiss Young Socialists Party (Juso).

Juso therefore launched the 1:12-initiative which demands that executives’ salaries be capped at 12 times that of the lowest-paid worker in the same company. “No manager should earn more in a month than his employees get in one year,” Juso demands.

Switzerland’s powerful neoliberal lobby had worked hard to prevent the success of the fat cat initiative. After its expensive campaign failed and with the 1:12-initiative already on the horizon, it became increasingly nervous. Further, a referendum on the introduction of a national minimum wage is scheduled in 2014.

Once the poorhouse of Europe, Switzerland has transformed into one of the richest countries on earth. Today, it has one of the highest GDP per capita in the world and unemployment at just three percent.

In terms of income inequality, Switzerland ranks around Europe’s average. According to the freshest numbers, 3.5 percent of the employed in Switzerland are considered working poor, while 11,586 top earners make more than half a million Swiss francs a year.

According to Daniel Lampart, chief economist of the Swiss Federation of Trade Unions (SGB), the growing salary excesses over the past 20 years were caused by the fact that executives’ earnings were increasingly connected to profits and the stock prices of their companies. “The introduction of bonuses allowed managers to divert big amounts of money from the aggregate wages into their own pockets.”

In Switzerland, trade unions are comparatively weak and the number of collective bargaining agreements is low. A national minimum wage doesn’t exist, the relationship between employees and employers clings to the concept of social partnership, and strikes are rare. It is mainly the upper income segment that has been profiting from the increased individualisation of wage policies.

The campaigns for and against the 1:12-initiative have just reached the hot phase. In one corner, there’s Juso, the trade unions and the Social Democratic Party. The opposing side is led by the umbrella organisation of Swiss small and medium-sized enterprises (SGV), with the other economy-related organisations as well as the liberal and right-wing parties on their coat-tails.

If the 1:12-proposal is voted in, only 1,000 to 1,300 mostly big companies with about half a million employees would be affected directly. About 4,400 top earners would face a salary cut.

The opponents’ campaign, which is unable to explain why somebody should earn 30, 50 or 100 times as much as an employee, focuses on warning the public how everybody would be negatively affected if the 1:12-initiative succeeds.

Hans-Ulrich Bigler, director of the SGV, recently said that losses to the old-age insurance system and to taxes could amount to nearly 4.4 billion dollars per year. He argued that tax increases would become inevitable.

A closer look at the concerned study shows that this number is based on a rather unrealistic worst-case scenario. Juso believes the initiative would reduce income inequalities, and elevation of the lowest wages would minimise possible fiscal losses.

Nobody is able to estimate economic and fiscal consequences at this point, as everything will depend on how affected companies would react to a new 1:12-rule. Would they elevate the lowest wages? Would they cut the top wages and use the money for investments? Or would they leave the country, as for example Ivan Glasenberg, CEO of the commodities giant GlencoreXstrata, has threatened?

The Swiss government fears first and foremost for the country’s competitiveness. “There is a real danger that Switzerland-based companies could leave the country, while foreign companies searching for a new location could be deterred by the limitations on high wages and not settle here,” Swiss Economics Minister Johann Schneider-Ammann said at a press conference.

When in 2009 Juso, led by David Roth, began to collect signatures for the 1:12 initiative, nobody expected that the proposal could have real chances for success. “The approval of the fat cat initiative in spring represented a break with the past. After years of deregulation and liberalisation people again started to demand rules for the economy,” Roth says.

Roth is aware of the fact that only one in ten popular initiatives turn out successfully. Nevertheless, he is confident that on Nov. 24, David will win against Goliath.

This report was first published here by IPS Inter Press Service.