Send Amplats boss to Switzerland

There's nothing the Swiss like more than a referendum.

In Switzerland, if you can get 100000 of your closest friends to sign a petition, you get yourself a nationwide referendum on any subject you like. As the BBC reported the other day, the Swiss system of democracy is so democratic it means "the Swiss could vote for free beer if they wanted to".

The latest Swiss poll, held on Sunday, proposed that the country guarantee everyone a minimum basic income of 4000 Swiss Francs a month, whether or not they have a job. A friend of mine was interested in the latest referendum because she lives in Switzerland and, through no fault of her own, happens to be unemployed at the moment.

Now CHF4000 equates to around R50 000 a month, a tidy sum if you think in terms of a South African cost of living, but you would struggle to get by on that amount in a costly, highly regulated country where you can't swing a cat without having to fork out for Switzerland's cat-swinging tax.

The referendum went against the minimum-income-for-everyone proposal so my friend will have an added incentive to look for a job, but the fact that Switzerland seriously considered it showed just how seriously the Swiss take the question of income disparity.

A few months ago a referendum that did pass electoral muster told companies how much they could pay their executives in bonuses after Swiss bank UBS handed out eye-popping 13th cheques to its top brass while its profits were going down the toilet.

Despite their enormous national wealth, the Helvetians are asking searching questions, sometimes at the ballot box, about inequality and fairness. So is the rest of the world.

Not that long ago we had the Occupy Wall Street movement of hippies and assorted lentil-eating malcontents asking whether it was right that the stock-broking and investment banking 1% were getting astronomically richer while the 99% - steelworkers, burger-tossers, newspaper columnists and other hard-working hewers of wood - were getting poorer.

Now we have Thomas Piketty, the French academic and writer whose book, Capital In The Twenty-First Century, provides well-researched answers to precisely the questions the Occupy beatniks were asking. Piketty has done the grunt work required to prove how, in our day and age, capital is rewarded at a rate that far outstrips the rate at which labour gets remunerated.

Then there is South Africa, where we have Chris Griffith, who earned a R17-million salary for running a company that takes minerals out of our ground, grinds them up, heats them, throws a few chemicals at the resulting glop and sells the output overseas.

While his workers, who toil underground in hot, unnatural, dangerous conditions, are starving for their demand that they be paid R12 500 a month, Griffith snapped angrily at a reporter who had the temerity to ask whether he was really worth 1000+ times what his lowest-paid worker was getting.

A funny thing is happening in those circles where people are capable of joining the dots and asking annoying questions: thinking people are starting to wonder whether the hotheads at Amcu don't have a point: is it really true that big listed companies, like Anglo Platinum, can't afford something approaching R12500 a month while one boss gets R17-million? When the dirty dozen running Amplats are so thick-skinned that they can ask, now of all times, to be allowed to divvy up a potential R77-million kitty while their mines and mineworkers sit idle?

We're wondering whether somebody like Griffiths has the emotional intelligence to lead a minerals extraction and processing company in a country as complex and divided as South Africa.

Big South African corporates always justify their extravagant remuneration policies by harping on about the need to retain key talent.

Maybe we should let some of them go find jobs with the likes of Glencore in happy Heidi-land.