Japan's digital minister surrenders salary to say sorry for data leaks Japan’s digital minister has doubled down on a June promise to penalize himself for the poor rollout of the country’s digital ID, My Number Card, by offering up three months salary on Tuesday. Minister Taro Kono’s comments relinquishing his Cabinet wages were given in an August 15 press conference in response to an August 8 …
Japan may be the only country where someone would take such responsibility. If a CEO of a big corporation screws up like that he'll blame those under him and then take a bonus a year later for all his hard work in handling the response to that PR black eye!
You indirectly raise an interesting point though, that the article didn't. A quick search shows fhat Japanese ministers are paid 5000000-7000000円/year. That's is not even half of the 120000€ that French ministers get, and it frankly sounds very low. Which makes me wonder what other income they have, and how much a 3 months salary loss really matters.
Not sure where you get your numbers from. I've read that the average income of House of Representatives members is over 22 million yen.
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2023/07/03/national/lawmakers-income-2022/
They also tend to sacrifice 3 months of many of OUR annual salaries to pay an even bigger fortune to the usual contractors that badly screw up every government IT project in an attempt to try and fix the mess they made. This gets them a well paid job on the board when they leave office too.
You beat me to it.
Perhaps we should set up a campaign to write to MPs suggesting a salary sacrifice scheme should be enacted for ministers when a project they sponsored doesn't go to plan. It could be made retrospective so Camoron and Bozo can be penalised for the HS2 omnishambolic clusterfuck.
Nor the increased cost of mortgages.
Only consolation is I read somewhere that Kamekasi Kwarteng had said he's paying a lot more for his mortgage too. But Truss has no shame or contrition and is still banging on about Trussonmics and getting paid for spreading the odious ideology
It was one of the central demands of the Chartists (a nineteenth century political movement in the UK with strong associations with the working classes) that MPs were paid a salary - as this would allow people that weren't independently wealthy to do the job.
So while I'm totally with you on the current shower in parliament doing whatever they can to feather their own nests, the unfortunate truth is if we don't pay them enough parliament will be packed with toffs on all sides. Give them a decent salary but clamp down on the system that allowed Boris Johnson to personally take £4.8m last year in donations while a sitting MP.
People paid on the public purse are in a no lose job for life. When they ####-up the organisation says "We sincerely apologise...we know we have to do better...lessons have been learned...". Then the organisations get fined, which is also paid from the public purse. Onwards and upwards...
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