Network Rail bosses back down on bonuses

"Network Rail executives were forced to freeze their
bonuses yesterday, hours after a public outcry over plans to defer
payouts for maintenance workers over the fatal west coast train crash
at Grayrigg.

Executive directors at the rail infrastructure company
bowed to pressure from union leaders eight hours after announcing that
they had withheld payouts for 119 staff while pocketing their own
annual rewards.

The uproar began yesterday morning when Network
Rail said it would pay four executive directors, including the outgoing
chief executive, John Armitt, a total of £286,000 in bonuses."(1)

Thank
heavens for the uproar. These mobsters don't deserve pay rises.
Salaries should be determined by people who work in an industry, not
leeches.

As the writer Humboldt wrote, man's primary impulse is
his freedom; "To enquire and to create, these are the centers around
which all human pursuits more or less directly revolve." "But," he goes
on to say, "all moral cultures spring solely and immediately from the
inner life of the soul and can never be produced by external and
artificial contrivances. The cultivation of the understanding, as of
any man's other faculties, is generally achieved by his own activity,
his own ingenuity, or his own methods of using the discoveries of
others."

"Man never regards what he possesses as so much his
own, as what he does and the laborer who tends the garden is perhaps in
a truer sense its owner, than the listless voluptuary who enjoys its
fruits. And since truly human action is that which flows from inner
impulse, it seems as if all peasants and craftsmen might be elevated
into artists, that is men who love their labor for its own sake,
improve it by their own plastic genius and inventive skill, and thereby
cultivate their intellect, ennoble their character, and exult and
refine their pleasures; and so humanity would be ennobled by the very
things which now, though beautiful in themselves, so often go to
degrade it."

"Freedom is undoubtedly the indispensable condition
without which even the pursuits most congenial to individual human
nature can never succeed in producing such salutary influences.
Whatever does not spring from a man's free choice, or is only the
result of instruction and guidance, does not enter into his very being
but remains alien to his true nature. He does not perform it with truly
human energies, but merely with mechanical exactness. And if a man acts
in a mechanical way, reacting to external demands or instruction,
rather than in ways determined by his own interests and energies and
power," he says, "we may admire what he does, but we despise what he
is."(2)

Source:
(1) http://www.guardian.co.uk/transport/Story/0,,2087909,00.html
(2) On the Limits of State Action, Wilhelm von Humboldt, 1792