boink

decisions like...let's close the factorys and have all our product in some forign land with no labour or enviormental regulation and then let's take all our money and stick it in a bank in the Camen islands so we don't pay taxes on it.

__________________
when you believe in things that you don't understand, then you suffer. Superstition ain't the way.

Cynthetiq

Maybe the average worker needs to save their money and invest in the company. I know many people who have done just that even when household budgets were tight. We're talking about a long term plan and long term goal. Buying new shoes because you like the new fashion gets you nothing in 5 years except for a pair of 5 year old, unfashionable shoes.

Why does it seem to be that immigrants (both illegal and legal) seem to be able to better themselves and their position over time both fiscally and socially than those that are born here?

Globalization is the problem, but so is the desire for record profits every quarter. It's unsustainable. There has to be blue chip type growth that is slow and steady. But we pay the CEOs these sums because we want the record growth to be there.

People need to make the decision on their own. As a shareholder, I expect a fair return for my investment. If I don't, I move my investment dollars elsewhere.

__________________
I don't care if you are black, white, purple, green, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, hippie, cop, bum, admin, user, English, Irish, French, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, indian, cowboy, tall, short, fat, skinny, emo, punk, mod, rocker, straight, gay, lesbian, jock, nerd, geek, Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Independent, driver, pedestrian, or bicyclist, either you're an asshole or you're not.

Baraka_Guru

A common trend, especially in the resource sector, is to build a company from the ground up, only to sell it off to a blue-chip once it's achieved "record profits." Some of the stock on these companies go from something like $4 to $32. Others have seen larger growth. Once the blue-chips are confident that the resource company has confirmed material stocks, they buy them up and absorb them into the company. I would guess that much of this activity contributes to the "record profits" of corporations....smaller corporations making tons of money as a percentage of growth before being bought out. You see the same thing in tech too.

I agree. I'd sooner want action from the "foreign lands," international lawmakers, and domestic tax legislators than I would from the corporations that make these sorts of decisions. These decisions make good business sense. I can't blame them for that.

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

robot_parade

Maybe. And CEOs are certainly smart people, and deserve to be richly paid for their hard work. But is it really market driven? The CEO and board of directors set their own salary. I talked about my conspiracy theory about institutional ownership being to blame - the people in the banks that own large parts of many companies are the same people who want to be CEOs and on boards of companies too. Maybe I'm just paranoid there.

If it really is market based, then ok. And fairness is one issue, but another is the health of society - I can't imagine that it's helpful that the gap between rich and poor in this country is widening every day. That Americans are the hardest working people in the world, and lots of us are losing our homes, and everyone's insurance plan gets crappier every year.

Cynthetiq

Let's get some facts straight.

According to the NY Business Law Board of Directors are not allowed ANY compensation. It is the same from state to state.

It is a volunteer position on top of their normal day to day job. The CEO doesn't set his salary. The Board of Directors sets the salary of the executive management team, including the CEO.

Now, again this is about attracting talent. If I'm on one board of directors, the chances of me being asked to be on another board is very high, because I've got a talent of sorts. So there are a number of executives that are employed by one company and then sit on the board of others. Why is that? Because they understand how business should be run and how to increase profits and direct executives. Understand that CEOs bring major changes and budgets to the BoD who then approve or disapprove things. They work in tandem for checks and balances, not for conspiracy.

__________________
I don't care if you are black, white, purple, green, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, hippie, cop, bum, admin, user, English, Irish, French, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, indian, cowboy, tall, short, fat, skinny, emo, punk, mod, rocker, straight, gay, lesbian, jock, nerd, geek, Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Independent, driver, pedestrian, or bicyclist, either you're an asshole or you're not.

Willravel

This doesn't demonstrate that it's right, just prudent if you prioritize the happiness of the man in the big seat over the happiness of all the little people. It's capitalistically correct, but that's not synonymous with being correct overall or ethical.

I'm way to young to have the experience necessary to be one of these super-CEOs, but eventually I might. I can't imagine a company slashing worker's wages or not continuing to pay them to match the cost of living just so I can get my second yacht being a smart business move. Maybe it's because of my opportunity to be pro-labor despite being in a management position, but it feels unbalanced to completely favor the man of vision over those who make the vision a reality. It should be equal.

Cynthetiq

You can want it to be equal. But it will never be equal. Even at Whole Foods where the CEO is paid X times the lowest employee. It's very challenging.

Even just managing people, you have that same responsibilty whether you like it or not. If my boss says to lay off X members of my staff, I have to do it. I may not like it, but it is a requirement of my position.

I fought for every nickel, dime, and dollar that my staff got. My team got paid more than any other because I documented their workload and showed it in comparison to other teams. I was not really liked by other managers because I made them look bad. It's not friends, it's business.

A wise executive said to me once, "As the manager of people, you are responsible for the quality of the food that is on your employees table." I take that to heart when I have any direct reports, but sometimes things like budgets get in the way. Sometimes that's the reality of the minimum wage issue. I get a pot of money that is my budget. I have X amount of headcount and have to divy that money up between them all. Once I make everyone's pay commensurate with their experience and tenure, there's little left for favoritism and extras.
-----Added 28/7/2008 at 10 : 57 : 10-----
Further, I hated merit review time. It is a farce for the most part. Again, I get a pool of money, which is usually around 3% increase of the budget. This means I can give everyone a 3% increase. How do I reward the guy who busts his ass and works more than everyone els? But what about the guy that fucks around? I can give everyone 2.75% and then have a point or two to give away if my staff is large enough. Or I can give the fuckoff less of a raise and pass that to someone else.

So I did just that for someone who watched soccer all the time while everyone busted their ass. I gave him a 2.5% increase and he went ballistic. I decided that he could either take the 2.5% increase or he could look for another job. He thought he had me cornered, but by the end of the day, he was packing his things and out the door.

C'mon will, you should know this stuff about budgets and employees. If you don't, you didn't really manage, you supervised.

__________________
I don't care if you are black, white, purple, green, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, hippie, cop, bum, admin, user, English, Irish, French, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, indian, cowboy, tall, short, fat, skinny, emo, punk, mod, rocker, straight, gay, lesbian, jock, nerd, geek, Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Independent, driver, pedestrian, or bicyclist, either you're an asshole or you're not.

loquitur

Will, I don't think there is any CEO out there who cuts little people's salaries for the purpose of freeing up money so he can buy a second yacht. That's a cartoon, that's not reality.

What's going on with CEO salaries is, as I said, similar to movie star or sports star salaries. There are a tiny number of people who are qualified for them and the competition to attract the talent is intense. It's a high-risk, high reward job, and there are lots of flameouts. I'm really amazed at why people find this to be so mysterious. The rewards of being at the very top of one's game are enormous relative to the second tier - and this is true not just for CEOs but for any similar kind of endeavor where the talent pool is shallow and the stakes are high. If CEOs were easy to replace they would be a lot less expensive. But they're not.

Willravel

Who said anything about it being equal? It's about managing the extremes. If the CEO has to make $15m a year instead of $17m so that the lower escelons of the company can move closer to a living wage and as such the company can avoid labor disputes, it would be time for some decision making that includes weighing the value of the CEO with the value of the work force. This is business 101.
That's exactly what I'm saying. Don't starve the employees so that you can get that hotshot CEO by giving him more food that he can possibly eat.

I was a good manager because I was able to prevent the ignorant people around me from abusing the underlings. Abused underlings, to quote Office Space, work just hard enough not to get fired.
-----Added 28/7/2008 at 11 : 16 : 55-----
It was hyperbole, but it's intended to demonstrate a real concern. When I did landscaping as a teenager, I made $6 an hour. I was a foreman (1 of 4 in the small company), I spoke fluent English, I knew the trade backwards and forwards and was a demonstrated leader. My boss, the owner, made $270k+ a year. Do you think that made me want to work harder, or do you think it's why I started talking about forming a union?

telekinetic

I endorse this post wholeheartedly.
-----Added 28/7/2008 at 11 : 31 : 26-----
It was obviously fair compensation, as you kept the job. If it was unfair, why didn't you get a job somewhere else? If the market value for a knowledgeable landscaper was higher than $6 an hour, why did you stay?

I'm not sure why you brought the owner's salary into the picture. You don't think the owner of a company, who put their own money up and risked financial ruin to get the company off the ground, should benefit more than the teenager he hired to hump a shovel?

Cynthetiq

Again, the BoD sets the criteria for compensation for the CEO and upper management.

You worked for a private company. You worked for a small company. What the OWNER decides to make as salary was probably not that amount at all. Not to mention that it is the OWNERS choice as to what to pay his employees.

I'd also state that forming a union is noble but hey great! I'm a small business owner. I've got lots of ways to prevent my employees from unionizing. From outsourcing human resources to firing employees who talked about unionizing. See it's all great to say and do these things, the reality is, the guy who signs the checks decides who stays employed. Again, the quality of the food, I'd choose to not give you any food.

__________________
I don't care if you are black, white, purple, green, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, hippie, cop, bum, admin, user, English, Irish, French, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, indian, cowboy, tall, short, fat, skinny, emo, punk, mod, rocker, straight, gay, lesbian, jock, nerd, geek, Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Independent, driver, pedestrian, or bicyclist, either you're an asshole or you're not.

Willravel

The 4 foremen were "sick" for a week and suddenly we were getting paid $12 an hour and the regular workers were getting closer to $7 instead of 5 something.
The owner's salary compared to mine is directly related to the subject at hand. Besides, he grew his business on the backs of others. He started by paying undocumented guest workers and was able to do well because he was able to pay them next to nothing. Actually, he always did that. It's why I know basic landscaping spanglish. Mas e menos.

Cynthetiq

call them what they are.... illegal aliens. this undocumented worker bullshit is just stupid.

and again, so they got a little more in wages... .whooop. the "owner" still took home more than the lion's share. You know why that's fair? Because the owner takes all the risk. The owner puts up all the capital money, equipment, and expenses. That's business 101. Again, not much different than the CEO.

__________________
I don't care if you are black, white, purple, green, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, hippie, cop, bum, admin, user, English, Irish, French, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, indian, cowboy, tall, short, fat, skinny, emo, punk, mod, rocker, straight, gay, lesbian, jock, nerd, geek, Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Independent, driver, pedestrian, or bicyclist, either you're an asshole or you're not.

Willravel

I use the same language as my lawyer friend who works with the ACLU. He's not stupid, he doesn't use stupid language, so I guess "undocumented guest workers" isn't stupid. They work harder than you and I put together, so they've earned a little respect.
Productivity shot up after my first little venture into the world of labor, which more than made up for the increase in wages. He may have been venturing everything, but it's meaningless without the most efficient means to put those investments to work.

Cynthetiq

Sorry, crossing the border illegally doesn't mean they get respect from me. My family came here by waiting for immigration papers and sponsorship. Please don't tell me to respect some piece of shit that broke the law when I slept on the floor for months as family member after family member was sponsored and came with legal papers.

Actually no it isn't. If there's 1 illegal alien willing to do the work, there's another few also willing to do it. ALL labor is replaceable. Even cheap mexican labor...

__________________
I don't care if you are black, white, purple, green, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, hippie, cop, bum, admin, user, English, Irish, French, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, indian, cowboy, tall, short, fat, skinny, emo, punk, mod, rocker, straight, gay, lesbian, jock, nerd, geek, Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Independent, driver, pedestrian, or bicyclist, either you're an asshole or you're not.

Willravel

We're getting a bit sidetracked on a different issue (which has lead to rather unspeakable things in the past ).

Neeways, it's okay to admit that while the CEO is important, the men and women upon who's backs the company stands are also important. McDonalds doesn't work without servers. Toyota doesn't work without guys in dress shirts and clip on ties.

Cynthetiq

Yes, but again, as tides ebb and flow, workers sometimes have the advantage, and sometimes have the disadvantage. MTV pays it's freelancers poorly, but you know what, if you don't want the job, there's many people willing to do the job for 1/2 just so that they can put it on their resume. I'd say the same for any Fortune 500 company.

__________________
I don't care if you are black, white, purple, green, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, hippie, cop, bum, admin, user, English, Irish, French, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, indian, cowboy, tall, short, fat, skinny, emo, punk, mod, rocker, straight, gay, lesbian, jock, nerd, geek, Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Independent, driver, pedestrian, or bicyclist, either you're an asshole or you're not.

jorgelito

I don't think they work any harder than any of us do. You haven't seen me work. And for the record, all the illegal immigrants I have ever worked with were lazy, unreliable, insubordinate and untrustworthy. I lived in LA for 10 years and worked a bunch of "shitty" jobs so I have a lot of experience working with them. Unfortunately, it was a bad experience.

Labor is pretty much supply and demand. The most stable and reliable job is accounting. Sorry it's not sexy or glamorous or exciting, but it pays the bills and puts very good food on your table. Of course, most people don't want to hear this and would rather whine and complain that the "man" is sticking it to them because they can't get a job as an artist, actor, underwater basket weaver, feminist, philosopher, poet whatever. People make their choices.

I decided I didn't want to work a shit job anymore so I learned what I needed to do to get a better one. I worked my ass off at Starbucks, saved my money and went to community college at night. My customers loved me because I worked hard and gave good service. As a such, I felt comfortable enough to ask them how they got where they got. Pretty much all the same answers. They went to school. Some of my coworkers did the same. However, others would rather spend their money on cigarettes, tattoos and piercings. Then they would sit around in their free time while complaining how the world was keeping them down. It's what you make of it. Develop your skills to make yourself competitive and your wage will increase. Work hard. Most of my coworkers always made fun of me for working hard. They would say, you don't own the store, why do you care? Or they would cut corners etc. I didn't mind because it just reduced my competition. Now these people are serving me my Starbucks and pumping my gas and I tip them too when I feel like it. Sky's the limit if you work hard and put your mind to it.

Not bad for a son of immigrants that came to this country with $50 and 2 suitcases. First thing my parents did was learn English because they knew they had to if they wanted to get good jobs.

__________________
"The race is not always to the swift, nor battle to the strong, but
to the one that endures to the end."

"Demand more from yourself, more than anyone else could ever ask!"

- My recruiter

roachboy

this is all very strange.

a/ when folk think about wage levels, they now by-pass questions of control at the level of the firm or sector and think wage---market relations and higher wages-->inflation.
during the fordist period, which dissolved in the early 1970s, higher wages for working people were fundamental to integration of working people into the machinery of consumption---the politics of wages were entirely different--and strange (though this is not the only explanation) the fordist system worked relatively well. you know, more equitable, more stable than is the current barbarism.

b/ there's a bizarre-o moral economy abroad in the land as well, thanks in large part to the workings of the conservative media apparatus----which has managed, by smart packaging of empty bromides enabled by deep funding which enabled the Key Factor in Ideological Conflict---repetition---to be worked to their advantage---which managed to convince people that a ceo "works harder" than someone with a minimum wage job.

fact is that in terms of expenditure of physical energy, the opposite is true.
the more onerous the task, the less you get paid for it.
sitting in a chair is not that hard.
it really isn't.

this entirely counterfactual notion of the hard-workin, hard-drillin ceo is self-evidently nonsense, but it is interesting as an index of the extent to which reasonable folk have taken over images of the world for themselves which not only explain but justify the extent to which they are fucked or, just as bewildering, the fact that most other people are more fucked than they are. by virtue of social and economic position.

it's like the denial of class across the board by americans, who operate inside a brutally stratified system.

distance distance=passivity passivity.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

loquitur

really, now, Roachboy, do I detect a "false consciousness" argument wafting out of that last post? Surely you should know better. Give people some credit for thinking for themselves. As for the CEO being hard-working, well, most are, but they're not paid for physical hard work, they are paid for a constellation of traits that is rarely found together all in one person, which is why they are so eagerly sought after and so highly paid. Not many people have vision, leadership ability, financial savvy, product knowledge, people skills, economic understanding, aggressiveness, analytical ability and other stuff all rolled into one package. That's why there are so few truly great CEOs. Think of Lou Gerstner or Jack Welch or Steve Jobs. It takes enormous talent and intelligence to run a multibillion dollar, multi-10,000s of employees organization, position it for the future, support the various constituencies, institute change, etc etc etc. I could never do it (which is why I'm in a job much more closely suited to my skill set). I expect most of the people here couldn't either.

Will, you are right that the people who do the work, down in the bowels of the corporate hierarchy, should be respected. I don't know how often I have posted about this - not very many, I suspect - but I have long been a staunch advocate of the view that any boss who does not treat his/her employees well is an ass, and deserves to lose his shirt. "Well" is relative and subjective, of course, but the fact is that for any job that requires a modicum of judgment - and most do nowadays - it's very hard to find good people whom you trust and who don't have other baggage. At my firm I don't do the hiring (though I have some input to policy) but I can tell you we always make sure to take care of our employees because we don't want to lose them and because replacing people is a horrendous job (the only thing worse is firing people - firing someone is the worst part of being a boss, even when it's well deserved). People are not fungible in most jobs.

However - the fact of the matter is that my firm exists because a couple of my partners founded it 20+ years ago and took a risk, because I and my partners bust our butts to bring business in the door and take care of the clients, and because I'm wiling to take the risk of having my assets on the hook to our landlord for our lease (which means that if we have a downturn in business I can lose everything). I'm very eager to keep our employees happy, but the fact is that they get paid, in full and on time, twice a month, with no risk and no obligation other than to show up and do their job. If there is a business downturn, they will still get paid but I might not. Matter of fact there have been times I have gone two months without a penny of income because business was slow -- but we damn well made payroll, and the employees got paid, as did the landlord and the electric company. So yes, I do think I'm entitled to make more than my employees. A lot more. I do a lot more to create wealth than they do. (Why didn't we lay people off when business was slow? Easy - bad times don't last forever, but good people are hard to find. I'd rather keep good people and take the hit myself than have to scramble when the business picks up). And I can tell you with 100% certainty that most bosses are more like me than like the cartoon image that people around here are peddling. I know because that's my client base.

roachboy

that's an interesting claim, made in passing, sir.

so you oppose the notion of "thinking for oneself" and thinking through ideological categories?
how do you manage that?
it is perfectly reasonable to see "thinking for oneself" and thinking through ideological categories as the same action.
if an ideological frame impeded action, it wouldn't be particularly functional.
they have to be inhabited/inhabitable to operate.
that they are inhabited/inhabitable doesn't mean that therefore they aren't ideological.

don't be fooled by the word ideology into thinking that once you say it you set yourself up as outside ideology.
there's a sense in which ideology is a resticted variant on ontology, and ontology simply the set of rules that you work through in the process of making elements (words, for example) function. the rules that shape usage aren't contained in that which is used--the world is not a collection of things.
ideology operates at the level of how you organize your sense of the world, of the political order, etc.
that everyone is caught in one or another set of images of the world does not mean that therefore all are equivalent.
unless you're playing a relativist game.
but if you're doing that, then you can't make the argument that a false consciousness argument is any better or worse than any other.

now i'm thinking about steve jobs. so far as i know, in my world, he is a guy who turns up on monitors from time to time extolling the virtues of his brand constellation, which includes the commodity "steve jobs," over other commodities. one of his skill sets clearly involves the successful branding of "steve jobs"---you or i may or may not also have the skill set required to brand "loquitor" or "roachboy"----but you're correct, neither of us has the requisite skill set for the successful branding of "steve jobs."
it isn't particularly clear what the skillset required to successfully brand "steve jobs" might be--chances are that there is no abstract skill set, no a priori skillset, but rather a skillset that was developed situationally.
so i expect that you or i or most anyone else could adapt to such a situation, and could develop the requisite skillset for the successful branding of our own "steve jobs"-like commodity.

and while those skills are perhaps specialized, fact is that no amount of exercise of those skills is as demanding as, say, working in a quarry.

nor is there any reason to think that folk who are in positions like this "steve jobs" commodity are ubermenschen.
they do have better marketing machinery around them, in the way that, say, bjork has better producers around her than, say, roachboy has.
the explantion for that is simple enough.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

loquitur

who said anything about ubermenschen? Many of them are terrible people with huge egos, they just happen to be very talented at running huge organizations. Roachboy, you're confusing a recognition of someone's talent with a value judgment about them as people. Those are very different exercises.

You also need to consider that your own "frame" is as influenced as anyone else's. Your view of the world is colored by your experiences and education and life history, yes? You can't assume that you have detachment and others do not. So this idea that your analysis of people as, in essence, brainwashed, really doesn't fly. You're not equipped to do it because you may just be as brainwashed as they are. I have years of training in trying to be detached and I still find I miss things. Brainwashing has nothing to do with it - being human does.

For instance, no amount of advertising will persuade me to become a cannibal. No amount of advertising will persuade me to kill or maim another person voluntarily. I can't imagine I'm different from most in that regard. The reason is that I find those things morally reprehensible and logically indefensible. I'm capable of making that judgment. So why am I - or anyone else - not competent to make any of a myriad other judgments, from which soap to use to which health care plan to sign up for to which charity merits support? Why deny agency to individuals? Aren't they entitled to that basic human respect?

Oh, and about Steve Jobs....... go google John Scully and you'll see the difference between Apple under Steve Jobs and Apple under the prior management (I forget the name of the guy who came after Scully but he also flamed out). Yes, he has created a cult of personality - but you can do that only if you have a personality that is cultable (is that a word?). If you prefer someone less flamboyant, with lower visibility, have a look at what Lou Gerstner accomplished at IBM.

Again, this has nothing to do with being an ubermensch - it simply has to do with the fact that talent of various sorts is not distributed evenly in the population, and that people with different kinds of talents get rewarded differently. No one is paying me because I can roll my eyes, wiggle my ears and jiggle my adam's apple, even though I suspect my ability to do that puts me way out on the right tail of the distribution. But people do reward Johann Santana for being able to throw a small sphere in a manner that makes it difficult for other people to hit it with a stick.

Willravel

I don't think I ubermentioned it.

loquitur

Will, that was a response to Roachboy. he's the one who mentioned it.

Willravel

You should be careful setting up puns like that.

Poppinjay

Al Dunlap. Charles Koch. Ilia Lekach.

Dunlap first slashed Coleman factory workers, then got it into his head that he should have a fancy log cabin headquarters in the Rockies instead of affordable Wichita.

Charles Koch's family is so dysfunctional, it makes the Bundys look like the Waltons. His HQ looks, I'm not making this up, eerily similar to The Legion of Doom HQ. He and his brother brow beat employees into making conservative campaign donations.

Ilia Lekach is just an egotistical pink silk underwear fuckup.

__________________
I think the Apocalypse is happening all around us. We go on eating desserts and watching TV. I know I do. I wish we were more capable of sustained passion and sustained resistance. We should be screaming and what we do is gossip. -Lydia Millet

loquitur

Poppinjay, read what I wrote. Your response is nonresponsive. None of the examples that you cited cut little people's salaries for the purpose of freeing up money so that they could afford a second yacht. In Dunlap's case, if I recall correctly, he fired people to improve the bottom line of the company, which was in a bad way and would have gone under without the costcutting. That's why he was hired in the first place. You can argue about whether he did it correctly or not (IIRC he also was a felon at Sunbeam), but corporate turnarounds have a long and perfectly respectable history - some are done by consultants and some by execs, but most do involve firing people. Companies that don't shed unneeded payroll tend to go bankrupt, which can lead to EVERYONE losing their job. Or is it your position that firing people is immoral, that companies are supposed to keep unneeded employees no matter what? I'm sure glad you're not running my company.

I'm not familiar with the other two examples you gave. But I doubt anyone fired an employee and used the savings for a yacht. Talk about stupid - a boss would have to be really stupid to do something like that.

pan6467

You obviously aren't talking about ooo say the airline industry (Delta CEO, I believe was the one that didn't) where the CEO's took huge pay raises as they came out of bankruptcy and had the stewardesses, pilots and other workers take pay cuts or layoffs.

__________________
I just love people who use the excuse "I use/do this because I LOVE the feeling/joy/happiness it brings me" and expect you to be ok with that as you watch them destroy their life blindly following. My response is, "I like to put forks in an eletrical socket, just LOVE that feeling, can't ever get enough of it, so will you let me put this copper fork in that electric socket?"

loquitur

You can argue that it was unseemly for execs to get nice packages when employees are being laid off, and on that I'll agree with you. But one didn't cause the other. You need to show me a causal link, Pan - show me that the employees would not have been fired absent the pay raise. That's what I was talking about. There's no causal link. The fact that separate decisions get made at the same time for different reasons doesn't mean that one caused the other. That's the missing link here. Delta was bankrupt - you really think the employees would have all come through the bankruptcy unscathed, no matter what happened to top management?

Plus, IIRC Gerry Grinstein retired once Delta came out of Chapter 11, and IIRC he was brought in specifically to steer the company through the reorg. Anderson was brought in to run the newly reorg'd company. I'm just going off memory here. And again, IIRC, the rationale for the pay package was that running a company newly out of bankruptcy is a high-risk proposition, which shouldnt surprise anyone, and that you need to pay to get good people or keep them. Again - you can argue with the reasoning, but to say that these decisions CAUSED layoffs is batty.

pan6467

Let me see Northwest goes bankrupt, gets government help.... then as it comes out of bankruptcy they demand the workers take pay cuts and layoffs, yet the CEO makes millions more.

Exactly what is right about that?

Delta's CEO didn't do that.

And yes I provided a link... it's posted earlier it's the bill moyers clip.

__________________
I just love people who use the excuse "I use/do this because I LOVE the feeling/joy/happiness it brings me" and expect you to be ok with that as you watch them destroy their life blindly following. My response is, "I like to put forks in an eletrical socket, just LOVE that feeling, can't ever get enough of it, so will you let me put this copper fork in that electric socket?"

loquitur

I didn't say it was right. I just said it wasn't causal. Things that happen at the same time aren't necessarily causal of one another, they can each be caused by independent causes. You can't show that NWA would have had no layoffs or even smaller layoffs if the management had not gotten a raise. I've done plenty of chapter 11 work and there is pretty much ALWAYS a spate of layoffs. That's one of the ways companies survive bankrupties, is by restructuring.

roachboy

loquitor: i don't remember saying anything about being outside of ideology.
i do remember saying the opposite.

i don't see any necessary relation between the administrative hierarchies that capitalist organizations are built around and any particular set of competences distributed in a given population. you know perfectly well that one's actual competences are not the only, or even the most important, criterion for selection. this isn't to say the opposite is holds, that there's no relation--i think the relation is close to arbitrary (crossing in some cases, not in others)...the assessment is aesthetically motivated though--what you choose to emphasize, what you choose to downplay. anyone's is, mine included---but there's systematic data that you can appeal to that controls for this tendency. so i don't generally think in terms of individual Heroic Entrepreneurs in questions like this. you seem to like to alternate between individual Entrepreneurs and assertions about the world as if capitalist hierarchies and some "natural" distribution of skills are more or less interchangeable.

i don't buy it.

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Cynthetiq

and one of the ways that CEOs get compensated is by accomlishing such tasks and making such decisions. It's not an easy decision to fire someone. You are directly affecting someone's life negatively. You are removing the ability for them to have an income. Maybe if they are lucky they get a severence.

I've had to lay people off before, it's not an easy decision to make which ones, let alone have to send down to the rank and file cost cuts and head count cuts across the board. You work day to day with some of these people and I expect to be paid more because when the time comes I have to do such stomach churning things.

Now looking at a CEO I knew personally and was friendly with is Tom Freston. Why did he get fired from Viacom? Because after a year all the achievements he'd done for 20 years at MTV amounted to squat because he couldn't move the stock price with any of the decisions he made. Yes he had a golden parachute, $20M payout. Stock is still floundering... even after laying off 250 people including some long time executives.

MTV Layoffs Include Execs
-----Added 29/7/2008 at 02 : 43 : 40-----
Not only is that against many compensation rules, it definitely is now against Sarbanes Oxley rules.

Even Steve Ballmer could not get an XBox 360 because of SOX compliance.

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jorgelito

Actually, didn't the Adelphia execs do something like that? They bought some expensive toys with company money and ended up going to jail I think. It was a few years back.

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Cynthetiq

yes, adelphia, enron, tyco, MCI Worldcom I believe who had CEOs and executives who were pilfering the company.

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loquitur

Well, Roachboy, it's a lot less arbitrary than you think. The correlation isn't perfect but it's there. I see it in the law firms I deal with and I see it in the businesses I deal with. People who are full of shit and kiss ass a lot can go only so far because at a certain level if there are no results it shows and there's no place to hide. Yes, there are time-servers and goldbrickers everywhere. Those aren't the ones who tend to get ahead because they don't have the drive. There are people who have drive but no smarts, smarts but no drive, smarts and drive but lousy luck or timing -- and on and on and on. Plus, there is a different mindset for rising in an organization versus starting a business on your own. I see lots and lots of these kinds of people.

Here's a comparison to chew over. There is a large public company I represent, and my contact there is one of the in-house lawyers. He asks me a question, I do my work, and I try to figure out a way the company can do what it wants to do - but if the answer is no, it's no. He's not happy about it, but if he's sure I have really thought the problem through and exhausted every possible way, then he's ok with it. Then I have an individual enterpreneur, street-smart, aggressive, and if he asks me a quesiton, I also try to figure out a way he can do what he wants to do - but if my answer is no, he fights with me about it because he's not used to being told no. And it takes me a while to get him on board. Very different types of people. These are actually archetypes, believe it or not. There are entire categories of people like each of them. The first guy is very smart, but he's not going further. The second guy would succeed if you took everything away from him and plopped him down in the middle of the Kalahari. He won't be a CEO because he's too much of a lone ranger, but he will succeed.

I guess this is a longwinded way of saying that even a non-perfectly-linear correlation is nonetheless a correlation. Yes there is luck involved. Doesn't destroy the correlation, though.

roachboy

loquitor---just to clarify, at issue here is basically the question of whether those who work for minimum wage or less *should* be paid that because of some correlation between skill set and wage level.

second, even if that's an argument for wage stratification (you know) it's hard to see why it would not be possible to hold that position and still support rising minimum wage levels.
but there's obviously a frame-switch involved here and it's also clear that these are the arguments being debated at this point because of how the thread's unfolded---but just wondering about them nonetheless.

i'll get back to the other points.

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loquitur

What? you mean you're pushing us back from the tangent? Imagine that!!

robot_parade

Yes, my point was, the CEO of one company is on the board of other companies, and the CEOs of those companies are on the board of directors of the other...most of the people directly involved in setting the salaries at the top directly benefit from those higher salaries.

And I'm not saying that CEOs and executives shouldn't be handsomly rewarded for their work. But my feeling is that lately executive compensation has gotten out of hand, *especially* for execs that underperform, and those who keep more of an eye on the stock price than on the long-term business. Not all execs. But some.

On the other end of things, I think it's pretty clear that worker compensation hasn't kept pace, especially on the low end of the scale. I don't know all the reasons for this. I don't think 'the man' is keeping people down as a conspiracy. But I do think it's unhealthy for society, and should be fixed if we can.

loquitur

I still want to see any evidence that workers' salaries are what they are because the CEO is paid too well. You can be unhappy about either of those phenomena, or both, but I still think it's fallacious to say that one caused the other. The market for top executive talent and the market for regular jobs are distinct markets. One can be roaring and the other stagnating without there being any necessary linear causal link between them.