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.
well, if you pocketed a cool quarter million, you’d still blog, right?
sure. and i wouldn’t even ask for a raise!
Is this a trick question?
From my laptop while sitting on a beach in the south of France. FRANCE, where I’d be spending my money and acting like my country had not been responsible for the shitrain.
Corporations are seriously out of control. Most of them, anyway. I’ve heard about a few that have rules stating that no one in the company can be paid more than 8 to 10 times more than the lowest-paid worker in the company gets. It would be lovely if we could legislate something like that, but I wouldn’t know the first thing about getting it started (and have no doubt it would never fly if I tried).
Actually if I were the kind of person who did that sort of thing I would love to see an organization put together whose stated purpose is to reverse the Supreme Court’s Southern Pacific ruling that institutionalized the treatment of corporations as citizens, and worked toward turning them in the direction of social responsibility rather than short-term greed. Not that it would ever get any kind of funding, of course.
That 8-10x lowest wage rule of thumb was in practice until somewhat recently I think, 40 years maybe? I remember reading about it in school at some point or another. Maybe it’s been longer than that.
In 1980, the average CEO made an equivalent of 40 workers’ salaries. Fifteen years before that — cut that number about in half. Now? In the hundreds.
Treating them as immortal people who cannot die or be sent to jail is the foundation for the looting by the kleptocracy. this is the lynchpin, and if we ever decide to get serious about progressive values this will be the place to start.
This isn’t strictly about Mickey Mouse, but I’ll use him as an example. Until recently the earliest Mickey Mouse cartoons were about to go from Disney’s copyright into the public domain. This would be a good thing from the public’s point of view, as then, for instance, if I wanted to make a music video and incorporate a few frames of Mickey playing the hippopotamus-xylophone from Steamboat Willie I would be able to do so without fear of getting entangled with Disney’s lawyers.
Disney, however, didn’t see it that way and managed to ram through copyright extension that makes a copyright last something like for the life of the copyright holder, plus fifty years. Now, since Disney is in no danger of croaking anytime soon, that effectively means that those old cartoons are never going to be released into the pool of common culture from which, ironically, Disney has drawn the inspiration for some of its greatest work.
And don’t think I’m just picking on Disney. They just happen to be one of the most visible symbols. Last weekend I got to see the musical version of Les Miserables. The writers and composers were able to tackle the book because it is part of the cultural commons. Who knows what would have happened, or how different it would have been, if some immortal corporation had held the copyright on Victor Hugo’s work and could impose restrictions on the musical or forbid it entirely. Or they could have done the same thing with Disney’s version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame — OK, bad example, there are probably people who would think that was a Good Thing.
In the end my point is the same as yours. Allowing corporations to have the privileges of natural persons with few of the responsibilities has caused great damage to our society. I just wish I knew how to address the problem (other than starting my own corporation and running it in an enlightened manner, something I don’t seem to have the genes for).
I could imagine what would happen if a ‘wage slave’ accidentally got over compensated. Would the employers bother looking at the employees record and decide to let her/he keep the bonus?
I think not.
That’s pretty much all that needs to be said, I think
It’s outrageous, sure, but we’re losing the debate when we allow the executive compensation discussion to become a referendum on performance. It should shock the everyday working stiff every single time we read about this shit. More of my thoughts on this can be found in this past Sunday’s Philadelphia Inquirer.
I repeat for the record — he’s worth only 55 of us when you don’t count $42,000,000 in options and other incentives.
I keep telling my husband that my next career move is going to be to screw up some major corporation. I’m just sure I can do it and the money seems great.
We on the left have to stop castigating the ‘corporation’ as if it were some impersonal entity striving to dominate our lives and our economy. That rhetoric traces its history to the early twentieth century, when the institution in its modern form was just taking shape. What we have here are real people, who by hook or crook, and I imagine occasionally by actual ability, have made it to the level of corporate leadership that permits them to effectively loot stockholders with impunity. Don’t talk about the corporation as the enemy, the enemy are the changing leaders the corporation. We need a new and better rhetoric to identify the true villains here. They are not the old class of robber baron that still informs our vision of how things work.
Among the many books that someone with the time, energy and ability ought to be writing is a prosopographical study of recent CEO’s of the Fortune 500. You need a large sample to correct for outliers like Ken Lay, Kozlowski and Welch. Where did they get their education, what is their trajectory to the top level where they (and if the estate tax is permanently repealed, their heirs from generation unto everlasting generation) can take the money and run.
This is a fool’s game. The ordinary shareholders are being looted, and the money is being used to loot the rest of us via the tax system.
I agree with you and I don’t agree with you.
I agree with you to the extent that individuals are responsible for their own actions. However, I also believe that the institution of the corporation is a fundamentally flawed one. Back in history it used to be very difficult to obtain a charter for a corporation.. and that corporation had to have limited objectives in mind… and when those objectives were completed they had to shut down. Now, it is much easier to establish a corporation, and when you look at the fact that in many ways corporations have many of the same rights as a provate person but with an organization’s power, you can begin to see that the rights of private individuals can suffer when pitted against the corps.’ might.
Corporations should not be afforded the same legal protections private citizens have. They are fundamentally different.. and their only motive is not the welfare of anything but their own shareholders pocket-books (and that’s the non- corrupt ones we’re talking about here).
Does this begin to put the NY Times back into anyone’s graces–sort of? This was on the first page and they have covered this topic before. I think a phrase they used was CEO’s “obscenely high salaries”. There are quite a few CEO’s who read the NY Times. I wonder if they are quaking in their (expensive handmade) boots yet.