Let Them Eat Cake

Neil Hall/Reuters Prime Minister David Cameron speaking at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet at the Guildhall in the City of London on Monday.

No doubt demands to hold down wages and expenses are perfectly reasonable in many instances.

But appearances matter, especially when you are demanding others make sacrifices. And sometimes those making the demands could do more to indicate that the pain is being shared.

There are examples this week from London, Seattle and New York.

1. In Britain, Prime Minister James Cameron spoke at the annual Lord Mayor’s Banquet of the need for more austerity.

As Business Insider noted, one photo from the speech, shown above, captured more attention than Mr. Cameron’s words.

The photo prompted The Guardian to ask readers to enter a caption contest.

Among the entries:

Excuse me for a moment. I’ll be okay in a moment. I just get so upset when I think of the poor working classes.

We’re all in it together! Although obviously some of us are more in it than others.

And many thanks to Marie Antoinette for the loan of her PR team…

2. In Seattle, Boeing warned that it might move plane production to another state if workers failed to ratify a contract.

The Times reported:

Workers had criticized parts of the eight-year contract extension during the meeting, including plans to limit pay raises to 1 percent every other year.

According to Boeing’s proxy statement, W. James McNerney Jr., the company’s chairman, president and chief executive, has not had an increase in his “base salary” of $1.93 million a year since 2008.

That certainly sounds like the pain has been shared, but the proxy also discloses his total compensation in 2012 was $27,484,138. That was up 20 percent from $22,958,313 in 2011. The 2011 pay was up 16 percent from $19,740,023 in 2010.

The proxy explained that the 2012 increase was primarily due to increased profits, and said that Mr. McNerney would have been paid more had his contract not placed a cap on total incentive compensation.

3. In New York, The Times reported on the hopes of city unions to get retroactive pay increases from the new mayor. They have had no raises for several years, the result of a decision to cut off talks with the Bloomberg administration and hope for a more labor-friendly successor.

The article quoted a deputy mayor in the Bloomberg administration as arguing that municipal workers should be grateful that Mr. Bloomberg, unlike many other mayors, avoided sizable layoffs, even during the worst recession since the Great Depression.

A union leader said the “city just finished another banner year with a major surplus.” But the deputy mayor rejected any idea there was money lying around. “The notion that there isn’t a deficit or there aren’t gaps in the budgets â€" those are real problems,” he said. “There’s no magic hidden pot of money.”

I have no reason to doubt his word. But it did strike me that the Bloomberg administration might have chosen a spokesman who name sounded a little more working class than the deputy mayor actually chosen: Caswell F. Holloway IV.