A Bath University spokesman defends Glynis Breakwell's £468,500 salary by claiming that 'The pay of the senior staff ... is more performance-based to reflect the risks and challenges in these senior roles' ('Resignation calls over Uni Vice-Chancellor's pay rise ', Bath Chronicle, 23 November).

This is the bog-standard corporate clap-trap which always used to defend the exorbitant pay of Britain's bosses - public and private sector alike - and it really needs to be exposed to closer scrutiny. If Bath University has become more successful under Glynis Breakwell's leadership, in terms of higher league table rankings for the quality of its teaching and research, who has actually undertaken these core roles; senior management or front-line lecturers?

While Ms Breakwell has enjoyed a telephone-figure salary, Bath University's academic staff will doubtless have endured an eight-year pay freeze (like millions of other workers), increasingly unmanageable workloads and targets, constant threats of redundancy, and a general lack of respect (to put it mildly) from senior management.

As to the 'risks' cited to justify such high pay, what risks? If the senior management team make a major error which loses the university money, it will be frontline staff who lose their jobs, so that the money can be recouped by reducing the salary bill. Even if a major blunder did lead to Ms Breakwell's departure, she would doubtless receive a generous 'golden handshake' before soon walking into another over-paid job on the senior management merry-go-round.

However, the wider context is also important. Since the 1980s, Conservatives have told the public sector to become more like the private sector, and more business-like. The furore over university VCs is a symptom of this - rampant greed at the top, and ever-widening inequality between bosses and front-line workers. Schools, universities and hospitals are increasingly run as businesses, and so just like large companies in the private sector, senior managers are often paid obscene salaries. These are invariably justified with the self-serving argument that their rivals pay similarly high salaries, and so they need to be 'competitive' in order to recruit and retain senior staff.

Meanwhile, those on the front-line, shop-floor or at the chalk-face - the staff who actually do the real work - have their pay kept as low as possible, regardless of how hard they work. This low pay is also justified on the grounds of 'competitiveness'. So while pay at the top goes through the roof, frontline staff suffer a race to the bottom, working harder and harder for less and less, and facing increasing job insecurity and cuts to their occupational pensions.

Welcome to corporate Britain plc - a 21st Century country reverting to 19th Century employment practices.

Pete Dorey