Recession, what recession?

"We are all in this together" is the often repeated government mantra that I'm sure we're all sick of hearing. Well clearly this isn't the case, as we all full well know.

This certainly doesn't apply if you work in the boardroom of one of the FTSE 100 companies. Last Friday one of the headline news stories told us just how far from the truth this really is. According to Reuters, the news agency who commissioned the report: "FTSE 100 bosses' pay leaps, outpaces share gains."

Now these companies are not called blue-chip for nothing, it stands to reason that they are going to be high performing and that they are going to weather a recession perhaps better than most. But average pay increases of 49%? It certainly isn't a question of performance related pay - in the same period that the report was talking about, (April2010 t0 the end of March 2011) the FTSE 100 index rose by just 3%.

For public sector workers, almost all of them have had their pay frozen. For people in the private sector, who aren't on the board that is, average pay settlements are running at 2.6%.

These eye-watering increases in remuneration take the average pay for a director of a FTSE 100 company to just short of £2.7 million.

And the reaction of the Prime Minister? He said the report was "concerning,"