I'm old enough to remmeber when there were maximum salaries, so is Jeremy Corbyn, which means he has no excuse.
Up until the mid 1980s very few CEO or big noises in firms got anything like the pay we see.
They however got:
Chauffeur Driven Cars
A really large % of the workforce got company cars, most substantial firms had a team whose job it was to buy/maintain/insure the bloody things and of course reimburse for fuel.
"Expenses" were a function of rank and only vaguely related to doing your job.
School fees were paid by employers, including the government if you were senior enough.
Subsidised mortgages, (yes really, no I'm not making it up)
Exotic levels of pension
Far more people flew first class.
"Conferences" and "meetings" in really nice places far away where you can bring a person of a compatible sexuality or even your wife.
Clothing allowances (not just for those who wear uniforms)
Luncheon vouchers (that used to be one of the UK's best known businesses, and you could use them to hire prostituites, no I'm not making it up, look
here
Or other fun would be provided at company expense
Bigger offices, very pretty secretaries and of course palaces.
Yes, palaces. Have you ever wondered why senior civl servants are often in buildings that Goldmans would regard as excessive ? Why a civil servant on 100K gets a chauffeur driven car that costs nearly as much as he is paid ? It's because of salary caps. Some of the civil servants I have visited have paintings on their office wall worth more than their house. The wallpaper for one civil servant in one room cost 59,000 quid. He was paid 120K per year.
They'd
love to have the cash, rather than the car, paintings et al, but salary caps mean they have to extract value oither ways. The UK prime minister earns less than the average person on this site.
She does however have the choice of two palaces to live in.
The expenses scandal for UK MPs is the same thing, non-UK readers will be surprised to learn that until recently, our elected representatives charged (no I'm not making this up) the cleaning of their personal moats, the construction of a duck house in their garden, porn, charitable donations, comics, jewellery and employed relatives who never even came to the office. Their salaries are effectively capped as well.
So if we cap private sector pay, we will see...
Even more exotic pensions
Cars or supercars or chauffeured cars for far more levels of management
An
understanding that for a given rank a certain number of duff relatives or attractive young boys/girls can be employed.
Office decoration will become a seriously good biz to be in as will "prestige offices"
(As an aside, when I first joined Wilmott, I had an office so posh that it's been in >20 films like Love Actually, things with Liam Neeson in them, the TV news, etc), I'd have taken £1,000 but the choice was not mine. This is because "stuff" is a less efficient and vastly less honest way of paying people than cash.
All this occurs amnyway of course, but the scale can was immense and would explode if this shit wre tried again.