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Comment by seanhunter | Hacker News Reader

You can see how important the salary reductions are by the fact Chris Hohn pays himself a mere 1m GBP per day.

This man had the highest salary of anyone in the UK.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/mar/05/the-very-pr...

When I read your comment, I assumed he actually had a 365 million salary, which would be amazing. He'd be paying 50% tax on the majority of that. I'd actually give him some respect for that, actually paying tax "fairly" and not optimizing.

But no, it's not his salary, it's dividends.

Dividends are taxed at the same percent as income in the Uk. So he is paying a lot on that.

Unless he isn’t resident in the Uk. Which I don’t know.

It is likely that the shares are held by a family trust or an offshore company registered in another jurisdiction, rather than being held personally by him. Although I am not familiar with the UK's tax laws, in other countries, loopholes exist that allow for taxable income from dividends of shares held personally to be reduced or eliminated through capital loss and depreciation deductions.

I don't know anything about his tax arrangements but he lives in South Kensington (in London) I think. I seem to recall reading about one of those classic South Ken arguments with neighbours because of him building a basement swimming pool or something.

He's our Prime Minister's old boss as well. Rishi Sunak used to work for TCI[1].

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/mar/08/rishi-sunak...

They are not taxed at the same rate, income tax goes up to 45 where as dividends stop at 39ish according to the HMRC website.

They are also not counted for NI contributions as far as I can tell.

Admittedly, the difference isn't as much as I thought.

Last i checked he was a non-dom....

At least he said directly what everyone knew and what every CEO hid behind "I take the full responsibility": the current layoffs are a maneuvre to lower the compensation of the employees. These companies know they can rehire these people at any point in the future, so they are doing this to keep the wages in check.

I find it funny that there are economists who still use the argument of class warfare for wealth taxation, indeed we're living a class warfare, but now we know that it's the working class that's being assaulted.

Why not just lower the wages then? Those who are content with the lower pay will stay, and others can quit and try their luck elsewhere.

Employment contracts are often written for periods of 4 years and include vesting schedules. It wouldn't be possible to lower a base salary of an employee without termination their employment contract by laying them off.

Google pays up to 24 months of compensation in the form of a severance package includes salary, vacation pay, bonuses and accelerated GSU vesting to laid off employees.

The minimum compensation for a laid off employee at Google in the US:

"We’ll pay employees during the full notification period (minimum 60 days).

We’ll also offer a severance package starting at 16 weeks salary plus two weeks for every additional year at Google, and accelerate at least 16 weeks of GSU vesting.

We’ll pay 2022 bonuses and remaining vacation time.

We’ll be offering 6 months of healthcare, job placement services, and immigration support for those affected.

Outside the US, we’ll support employees in line with local practices. "

After layoffs, it's hard to get comparable high compensation offers at other companies.

Is it legal to lower wages for current employees? In my country it isn't.

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