In Moneyweb on Friday Professor Adam Habib, deputy vice chancellor, research, innovation and advancement at the University of Johannesburg, wrote an indignant reply to an earlier article on that website by the economist Mike Schüssler.
Schüssler had argued earlier in the week that, according to StatsSA data, the typical employer earned far less than you would expect from all the overheated rhetoric in the media about South Africa's overpaid bosses. He stated: it is "madness to believe that all employers earn what the 100 richest earners in the country get, in fact often the top earners are employees themselves. ... I can hear the screams of disbelief from clever folks that this cannot be true. Sensational rich lists which highlight the earnings of the top 100 earners in the country are just NOT a reflection of reality. Analysts should quote them as if though they are."
Habib, for some reason, took offence at this criticism though he was not directly named. He said that what analysts, like himself, were taking issue with was the culture of "crass enrichment in our society." He noted:
"I have criticised cabinet ministers when they pulled out expensive cars on getting into office as an example of crass enrichment. I criticised CEOs in parastatals of enrichment even though I was aware that they did not own the enterprise. Similarly I have criticised some CEOs of private companies of enrichment, and I have criticised those employers who it pertained to. The critique was always against enrichment by whomever it applied to."
Habib proceeded to accuse Schüssler of falsely pretending to "care for the poor bloke on the street" while actually defending this culture: "Why is productivity the stick with which you berate workers for the ‘inflated' wage demands, but you remain silent on executives who get multi-million rand bonuses even when the performance of their companies is lacklustre? It is this kind of hypocrisy that enrages union activists and lies at the core of the recent strikes in the country."
He continued: "Let me conclude by clarifying why many of us condemn this crass enrichment. It is not because we do not want people to be rich. Rather it is because we realise that for us to move forward as a society, we are all going to have to be circumspect in how much we spend today."