Smith is a top negotiator, albeit for himself, but we could use his skills

If the average income of a farmer is €28,000, what is the fair multiplier of that for the CEO? asks Terry Prone

I DON’T know. I just don’t know. I don’t know if the IFA did the right thing when they decided to part ways with their secretary general.

The man who left the building, the little red kerchief at the end of the stick over his shoulder filled with millions and millions, and that was after him earning half a million a year or thereabouts.

If I were a farmer, I’d think twice about losing a guy capable of negotiating such packages.

Admittedly, he negotiated those packages for himself but skills are transferrable, you know?

Any guy who can persuade people to pay him more than four mill to not work for them is an impressive negotiator.

If, just to pick an example out of the sky, he were to be tasked with the job of doubling farm incomes, you have to assume he would be unstoppable.

You’d have to keep him away from the PR department, though.

A matchless negotiator he may be, but when it came to post-factum PR, things went a bit pear-shaped on him, although that’s a separate issue. Stick with me. We’ll get to the PR faceplant.

Let’s start, however, with the fascinating immediate assumption, among media, farmers and the general public, that he wasn’t worth it.

That assumption was reached at lightning speed with damn all evidence adduced to support it.

It wasn’t as if anybody examined his performance over the past decade and outed him as notoriously unpunctual or not being nice to the guy delivering the bottled water or something.

Just knowing that he was paid half a million euro in a year, without knowing what he did for it, drove people out of their minds.

Pat Smith

That’s because something happened to our attitude to other people’s salaries during the recession.

Pre-recession, when we read of people earning a million a year or more, it was like reading about people winning the lottery.

We envied them a bit, but we filed it in a separate category. Meanwhile, back in our own jobs, competition for bonuses, share options and other forms of compensation went berserk.

As did the sharing. Oh, my God, the sharing.

Our parents didn’t tell anybody what they earned. Decency forbade. Or maybe it wasn’t decency.

A hell of a lot of men, back then, as the sole earners, didn’t even tell their wives what they earned.

If they were lucky, wives were given an amount sufficient for them to run the household. But nobody talked about it.

You might say with pride that the man of the house was a doctor or a solicitor or a principle officer.

You might even let it slip that he had a company car, although this had its downsides: people might think he was a travelling salesman.

But reveal his pay packet, assuming you knew it? You’d have to wash your mouth out with carbolic afterwards, so you would.

That secrecy led to the most marvellous creativity when it came to professions involving expense accounts.

People showed a talent that would have allowed them to win the Booker Prize on a monthly basis, when it came to padding their expenses.

Friends might occasionally share cunning expense ploys, but here again, a decent discretion was deployed: the overall sum earned thereby was not shared.

The Celtic Tiger changed all that. Suddenly it was cool to announce that you were on “150K” and would expect a “70K” bonus at year end.

Parents meeting each other did faux-outrage about the boatloads of money being earned by their offspring.

You know how that goes. Eyes to heaven. Eyebrows up as far as Botox will permit. Wondering shake of head.

“My Andrew says he’ll take home a quarter of a million this year and Natalie, his wife, if she makes partner, might do just as well. Imagine...”

The message was that this level of pay was astonishing and nobody needed it and God be with the days when we were saving pennies in jam jars.

But still. (Small pride- filled smirk.) Then it all crashed down and the nation went into pride-reversal. Even if you could afford to change your car, you didn’t, out of fear you’d look loaded.

Everybody was happy to claim to have had their salary reduced by 20% or 30%, but less happy to announce the amount from which that percentage had been deducted.

More to the point, anybody earning more than €100,000 a year became evil.

Never mind that they might have three degrees, that they might have children, that they might have bought a house in the good days that was now crippling them with repayments.They were overpaid.

Full stop.

That extreme and punitive view is beginning to swing back, very slowly, but not quickly enough for the IFA man’s half a million to be acceptable.

Without knowing what he did for it, without knowing the conditions under which the organisation decided to pay it to him, a fury frenzy developed which seems to have propelled him right out of a job he must have loved.

You know the way you love a job that pays half a mill? Me, neither, but I’m sure I’d love it. So this man left the post.

Cleared his desk and off with him, pausing only to load up with dosh in pension pots and severance payments.

Now, instead of fury frenzies about what people like the IFA guy got paid, it would suit us better to make collective decisions before the problem becomes a crisis.

First of all, in any organisation, commercial or public sector, there’s a case for a multiplier. A stated, clearly understood multiplier.

Meaning that if the average income of a farmer is, as has been claimed, €28,000, what is the fair multiplier of that sum to be paid to the CEO of the organisation?

Three times? Six times? Ten times? More?

You don’t know and neither do I.

But it’s time we got down to making these kinds of decisions about what is proportionate and fair and what is disproportionate and grossly unfair.

Indeed, it’s strange that corporate social responsibility programmes don’t address this issue, because it is fundamental to the expression of a company’s sense of what it stands for.

Wouldn’t it be cool to see framed notices in corporate lobbies saying “Our CEO will never be paid more than five times what our lowest paid staffer takes home”?

Great incentive to bring up the wages of the lower paid too.

Remember, if the CEO gets 100K as five times the 20K paid to the lad on the lowest rang, the CEO would want that lad dragged up to 50K because then the CEO gets a quarter of a million.

Let us now address the PR complication. This man said, in effect “Looka, you lot are all aggro over paying me €2m.Tell you what — give half of it to charity.”

Oh, dear no. If a farmer believes someone has lifted two mill out of his back pocket, he doesn’t give a sugar if the guy doing the lifting gives half of it to charity.

So there’s the bottom line. Great negotiator. Lousy at PR.