Top Firms To Link Pay To Number Of Protesters
After a couple of days break in London having a pop at the G20, bankers, capitalism and the like, the angry mob moves to New York Friday, demonstrating against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and picking on Wall Street's finest.
But every cloud has a silver lining, and top financial markets firms have already capitalised on this week's events. 'It's been a tough year', one London-based senior HR professional told Here Is The City, 'But the G20 protests have been good for morale. The staff can get out there and forget all their worries. Inciting the rioters, smoking some weed, and hooking back up with some old friends (a lot of the protesters once worked in the industry, you know). It's all a very welcome distraction'.
Even more importantly, however, firms have used this week to test out a possible new compensation model theory. As the industry struggles to identify an appropriate pay formula which incentivizes employees and, at the same time, protects shareholders from short-termism, several firms are now working on an innovative new compensation scheme tentatively called 'PPP' (Pay Per Protester). The logic is simple and compelling.
The program was apparently devised by the same group of traders who came up with the clever idea of securitizing mortgage-backed securities. This talented cadre realised, while observing events in London this week, that protesters usually gravitate towards stirring up trouble outside the most successful firms (there are exceptions, however, as the riots outside Royal Bank of Scotland Wednesday clearly prove). But, by and large, the theory is sound.
The idea is that, instead of senior managers sitting for days in once smoked-filled rooms throwing darts at numbers on a board, the way bonuses are paid in future can become much more scientific; the size of a firm's bonus pot will simply be linked to the number of pumped-up protesters outside its building baying for blood. 'It will also take a lot of anger out of these kind of situations', one of the scheme's originators told Here Is The City, 'Henceforth, bankers will literally put the flags out for the rabble. And the mob are always protesting about something, so we're pretty confident that we can incite them to come up to town at least once a year for the comp round'.
There are still, however, some kinks that will need to be ironed out before the scheme can be implemented. Unfortunately trials in London this week revealed that the proposals are open to abuse. 'Although the pilot this week was mostly successful, 'a spokesperson for one of the participating firms told us Thursday, 'We did catch a small group of traders paying protesters to move operations to outside their own firms. The traders even offered bonuses if the mob kicked-in a few windows. Personally, though, I blame the protesters - that lot will do anything for money'.
