ON Monday, thousands of NHS staff staged their first strike in 32 years over pay.

They want Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary, to open negotiations with the unions and belatedly agree to the one per cent pay rise the NHS pay review body recommended.

That doesn’t sound unreasonable to me. It is slightly lower than the current rate of inflation and high quality paramedics and midwives deserve a decent standard of living.

“We are striking with very heavy hearts,” said Louise Hughes, a midwife for 19 years.

The action came on the same morning a report showed directors at the top 100 listed UK companies now earn 120 times the average sum earned by their employees.

This year bosses' pay rose by more than a fifth, Incomes Data Services (IDS) said, with top directors now typically earning £2.43m a year in pay, shares and bonuses, rising to £3.3m for chief executives.

Official figures put the average annual salary at £27,000.

Years of high earnings growth has widened the pay differential between FTSE 100 chief executives and the rest of the workforce.

Barring shareholder revolts, private firms can pay their senior people whatever they want. But it’s interesting to note how many FTSE 100 businesses have benefitted from lucrative contracts with the NHS - to supply everything from food and pharmaceuticals, to the running of car parks.

This means that public money is helping to fund pay increases in private firms.

Next time you are charged a small fortune for parking your car after you have been into hospital for treatment, or to visit a loved one, just remember that your money is helping to swell the pay packets of Britain's top bosses.

“Every year people ask if this soaraway boardroom greed can continue,” said Frances O’Grady at the TUC.

It would seem that it can.

DES Blackadder, editor of the Ballymena Times, might have chosen a better phrase last week to sum up the shocked reaction in the Northern Ireland town where 800 jobs were being cut at the UK’s last remaining cigarette factory. “There were many ashen faces in Ballymena,” he told the BBC.

AT this time of year I’m deluged with invitations to awards nights, business dinners and events. I try to attend as many as I can. One that I was happy to decline was a particularly dull-sounding session called: Obtrusive light: Navigating the compliance minefield.

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