Has anyone ever receieved a six to seven figure bonus in their lives? How about receiving a six to seven figure bonus if your company fails to turn a profit? How about a six to seven figure bonus that is not allowed by your company? The largest bonus I’ve ever received was for a grand total of $100 as the sales staff I was a part of at a paper I used to work for in town hit x% over the quarterly goal. The whole company – editors, writers, sales staff, admin staff – all gets the $100 bonus; how egalitarian eh?
Reading this NY Times article on big time execs receiving unwarranted [well, warranted in the compensation boards’ eyes] just made me sick. We’re right in the middle of the Enron, WorldComm, Tyco and various other big money fuckups era and this just keeps going on like nothing is wrong. The article starts off:
It was the kind of mistake that wage slaves can only dream of. Because of what the company called an “improper interpretation” of his employment contract, Sheldon G. Adelson, chairman, chief executive and treasurer of the Las Vegas Sands Corporation, received $3.6 million in salary and bonus last year, almost $1 million more than prescribed under the company’s performance plan.
It continues…
Four more top executives of the Las Vegas Sands, which owns the Venetian Resort Hotel and Casino, received more than they should have. The total in excess bonus payments for the five men was $2.8 million.
The compensation committee of the board conceded that it had made an error. But it said that “the outstanding performance of the company in 2005” justified the extra money, and it allowed the executives to keep it.
Shareholders of Las Vegas Sands did not fare as well. The value of their holdings fell 18 percent last year.
The article takes a good look at the background of the compensation board an the top execs at Halliburton, Big Lots and News Corporation: all three with some shoddy bonus packaging. The article didn’t shock me though. I know that it goes on and who am I, a $10/hr wage worker with no health insurance, no equity, no savings, no stocks, no clout really. This isn’t a Democratic machine in a city I live in and can just dive waist-deep into through will and determination because it still is an elective democracy. It’s a backroom decision made by people sitting on a board who are chummy with the CEOs, CIOs, COOs, Presidents, Sr. VPs who all go to the same country clubs and pull into the special parking spots at their company lots.
Much can be done to spread the word of the misdeeds of those at the top. In politics, we can regroup, get mad and vote those fuckers out of office. In business, what’s the equivalent? Boycott? Picket? Launch cream pies at stockholders meetings? And it should also be noted that the LV Sands Corp. exec who got an unwarranted 60% hike in his bonus is pictured with an orchid in his lapel, that’s just creepy. Creepy I tells ya.
And I should add that at a former job [I used to work for an online personals company as an account manager] I got a paycheck that was a ridiculous amount of money by mistake. I went to the money guy and showed it to him and he nearly literally fell out of his chair. Looking through his records, he determined that somehow payroll got screwed up and I got the amount the CTO gets [and holy shit was I envious of him and his 2x a month check]. The money was already direct deposited into my account, but it was easy enough to take out and the problem was fixed. I can’t imagine if I got a check for say, $200K by mistake or unwarranted or illegally [by company protocol standards] and just kept it like the fuckwads in the article have.
