LAURA SLATTERYlooks back at the week in business

Pay day

Christoph Mueller’s first full-year as chief executive of Aer Lingus was a rewarding one – he collected €1.13 million in salary and benefits last year, the airline’s annual report has revealed. It broke it down into a basic salary of €475,000, a performance bonus of €483,000, a pension contribution of €119,000 and €55,000 in “other benefits”.

Aer Lingus generally caps annual performance-related bonuses of 100 per cent of basic salary for its top executives, but in Mueller’s case, it factored in the four months of 2009 he had spent in the job. Assisted by the recovery in long-haul markets, Mueller turned losses into profit in 2010. It was his “operating savings” that helped get his bonus – the airline cut its average headcount by 328 in 2010, clipping €53.4 million off staff costs.

Court date

It’s the biggest employment class action in US history. Some 1.5 million female employees of Walmart are suing the largest retailer in the world for back pay, alleging it engaged in discriminatory pay and promotion practices. The long-running suit claims women were victimised by Walmart’s practice of letting local managers make subjective decisions about pay and promotions, resulting in denial of management training, failure to promote, retaliation for initiating internal grievances, old-fashioned harassment and entirely predictable denial of equal pay.

The case, which began in 2001, reached the US supreme court for oral hearing this week. The three female judges on the court bench voiced qualified support for allowing the suit. Two of the male judges were less enthused.

1 million– number of people in the Republic who use Facebook every day.

“The hard wiring of ratings is now so pervasive, market participants could not ignore them even if they did not consider them reliable"

A Bank of England report considers how to solve a problem like the credit ratings agencies

STATUS UPDATE

Creative control: James Brown (not the soul singer) has been appointed chief executive of Ulster Bank, where he will take over from Cormac McCarthy (not the novelist).

Finishing line: London’s Olympic Stadium has been completed on time, as the 2012 construction phase reaches what stadium architects call “the beginning of the end”.

Breakfast bonus: Porridge is proving just right for UK cafe chain Prêt à Manger, which revealed it had boosted sales by shifting 50,000 bowls of Goldilocks’s chosen dish each week.

The Question: Is the future bright for magazines?

The future’s bright, the future’s Apple-shaded for the glossy consumer magazine business.

Leading players have been falling over their chunky wedge heels to develop mag apps for iPads in the hope they will be the saviour of the sector – or so the theory goes.

One such player is US magazine publisher Hearst, owner of Cosmopolitan, Harper's Bazaarand Good Housekeeping.

Earlier this month, Hearst executive David Carey told a Bloomberg media summit he expected that tablet computers could provide 25-30 per cent of magazines’ circulation in about five years’ time – that’s 25-30 per cent fewer free skin cream sachets, presumably.

Hearst’s optimism appears to have been behind its decision to splash out $651 million this week on purchasing the rights of several titles from Lagardère, including women’s magazines Red and Elle.

Separately, publishers are lining up to buy BBC Worldwide titles for an estimated price of more than £100 million.

A recovery in advertising revenues, coupled with potential avenues of growth via tablets, suggests that the glossies’ bottom lines are set to be enhanced.

But the key word is “potential”. There is still a battle to be fought between publishers and Apple over who gets control of the subscription data. Publishers, understandably, want to know who their readers are.

While they push for a deal, the iPad magazine market is stuck in an awkward pay-per-issue limbo. And of course, the question of whether aspirational fashion magazine readers are prepared to shell out on iPads in the first place is yet to be answered.

It’s little wonder, then, that Hearst Corporation chief executive Frank Bennack has been moved to note that “ink-on-paper magazines will be with us for a very long time”.