MOSCOW, March 13. /TASS/. Russian President Vladimir Putin has castigated the exorbitant salaries paid to the top management of public companies.
"Honestly speaking, I find this annoying and preposterous. I agree," Putin told TASS in an interview for the project entitled "20 Questions with Vladimir Putin," when asked whether he agreed that a public corporation’s status and its top management’s free market salaries were mismatched.
Putin believes that to a certain extent this was a result of the general free market value of services provided by the managerial personnel of this level.
"Many things are not as simple as they might look at first sight," he said. He remarked that he had a discussion with some top managers on that score and they said that "they hire many foreign specialists, who work effectively and are worth something on the market, that is on the international labor market."
Putin explained that public companies had to hire them and pay them a wage equivalent to the cost of their services on the international labor market, while maintaining a certain gap between the level of incomes of bosses and their subordinates. He added that there was no place in the world where a boss was paid less than his subordinates.
Putin drew a parallel with the salaries of military and civil aviation pilots, in particular, the situation where civil aviation pilots began to be paid better for the simple reason that airlines started hiring foreign personnel. "They were forced to hire foreign pilots, in particular, those with experience of flying Boeings and European planes. They had to raise their pay to meet European and US standards."
Currently, he said, military air pilots eagerly take the jobs of co-pilots, because in the Air Force they were paid less. "This distorted the labor market," he noted.
Episode 13 of the video interview is available at https://putin.tass.ru/en.