Thames Water's CEO has a $1.5 million pay package which is lower than CEOs of corporations of the same size. The funding for public unions in the UK is $233 billion. Great comparison there.
> The funding for public unions in the UK is $233 billion
That’s a pretty amazing figure, how was that calculated?
Are you seriously arguing that that the Thames Water CEO was underpaid? They have been mismanaged extraordinarily. Their debts, losses, costs, service and environment records are so poor that nationalisation is being discussed. They have been paying dividends and bonuses throughout.
CEOs of corporations of the same size quite often have to find and retain customers in competitive markets - which is hardly the case with Thames Water?
What is your point? $1.5 million is used to attract a CEO who can manage a large corporation. That is less than many players on second tier English clubs who are riding the pine. That is a rounding error when considering $233 billion paid to unions.
Yes they do, from rival businesses, superior and new technology, just look at Chat-GPT potentially putting programmers out of work, or telegrams being made redundant by pagers, and text messages and email.
@arethuza
>CEOs of corporations of the same size quite often have to find and retain customers in competitive markets - which is hardly the case with Thames Water?
Water companies are delivering a minimum standard of water, call it the least toxic form of water considering the energy constraints and logistics of delivering water en-masse compared to other methods of obtaining water.
Mains water from a very young age always made me sick, so where possible I use bottled spring water in the kettle, but am currently considering a reverse osmosis water filter, to deionise the water in the house as much as possible.
Deionised water is the best tasting, sweetest tasting water I've ever experienced, and if I listened to the medical experts I should be dead on numerous counts of their assertations. So two fingers up to them as well! LOL
I don't think you understand what these companies do if you believe Thames Water is in competition with Evian or Brita. Remember they're not just providing drinking water but handling the treatment, recirculation and safe disposal of wastewater too. So in addition to having inadequate fresh water storage for some parts of England and cutting back maintenance to the extent that they lose an enormous amount in leaks, one of the bigger problems is how they're failing to adequately dispose of wastewater. As a consequence of this there are some rivers, lakes and beaches in England + Wales that are now unsafe but which weren't before they were privatised.
> As a consequence of this there are some rivers, lakes and beaches in England + Wales that are now unsafe but which weren't before they were privatised.
Carefully chosen words, someone has done their research!
Thats what happens when new standards come into force and improve upon the old standards.
"The purpose of this dataset is to present a summary of bathing water compliance in England between 1988 and 2014 against the old bathing water directive (76/160/EEC), which was repealed on the 31/12/2014"
However I'm not against better standards, but I am against some of the "engineered" methods used to gain those standards....
You're going to have to do a bit more than hand-waving about a bathing water directive being repealed back in 2014 and dumping a couple of links. If you want to make a point, make it.
There's lots of factors at play here, it could be brexit related because the beachs have become soiled so people go to Europe for a break, we dont know who is invested in Thames water, are these british pension funds or other types of investors. Is this a sexism thing, what with a female ceo, has she been wrongly advised, manipulated with data presented in a particular way.
There's so many factors potentially at play here and some of it we wont get to ever know about, but life has taught me there is manipulation in many guises.
Wait before you were certain I was some sneaky trickster doing wordplay and that you had a slam dunk of a response, now “there’s lots of factors at play here”?
Nothing has changed, I simply didnt document all my thoughts on here straight away because its not a Rorschach test, besides I let google suggest some of the links, because I've noted how manipulative it is at shaping public discourse.
In the examples here, no, CEOs don’t face real competition. Water companies are sold off public utilities. They way they make profit is to degrade service and raise prices. No one is going to install a competing water system. No AI is going to do that anytime soon.
The Economist has a political bent, but they are clear on how privatisation has gone: ‘Dogmatic adherence to privatisation in the face of its sustained failure suggests ideology, not pragmatism, was the motivation.’
> Water companies are delivering a minimum standard of water
No they aren’t. That’s a key point in the article.
> They way they make profit is to degrade service and raise prices. No one is going to install a competing water system.
So that other technologies, like rainfall capture systems and water filtration systems can be become financially viable through economies of scale. If you have a roof you can top up water tanks, water filtration systems clean the water and can recycle the water. Reverse Osmosis filtration which deionises the water is about as pure as you can get, so pure nothing can grow in it, which is why colony forming units (CFU's) aka TVC's are so low, lower than spring water.
Not long to go.... standby for some more "engineered" news.
>The Economist has a political bent,
Whilst its easy to say, privatise problems, Thames water has its own unique problems, but when looking at something like the coal miners, what did it do? It shifted people away from using coal to other less large airborne particulate laden forms of fossil fuel, the latest being air source heat pumps 1w in 4watts out at best, solar power 15-22% efficiency, and nuclear with the debate over the use of different nuclear fuels, like plutonium and thorium. Sort by Specific Energy (MJ/Kg) at this link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#In_nuclear_reac...
Anyway some things are engineered including things in the news like Thames Water.... Someone's getting a shake down!
I'm in Scotland so I have perfectly pleasant tasting water from the state-owned Scottish Water whose CEO get paid a small fraction of what the Thames Water CEO gets paid (~£295K plus
bonus).
"Paid to unions"? Do you mean paid to staff who might be members of unions? And if so why you are comparing money paid to a specific company to money paid to union members across the entire public sector?
I don't think you want to point at English football clubs if we're talking about sensible compensation, not least since one of the issues highlighted in the article are the debt load of these English and Welsh water companies.
