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For CEOs, it may pay to lay off
Businessman with $100 bills in suit jacket pocket.
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TEXT OF STORY
STEVE CHIOTAKIS: Another broadside this morning in the battle over executive pay. A report from a liberal think-tank concludes: if you're the CEO,
it's a good deal to slash jobs. And the executives who laid off the most workers? They ended up with the fattest paychecks.
Marketplace's Mitchell Hartman has more.
MITCHELL HARTMAN: The Institute for Policy Studies looked at the 50 companies with the most layoffs -- like Johnson & Johnson, Wal-Mart, Verizon. Their CEOs made 40 percent more last year than the typical big-company CEO, says researcher Sarah Anderson.
SARAH ANDERSON: There's still the idea that when an executive slashes thousands of workers that they are making the tough decisions necessary to make their company mean and lean.
PETER COHAN: I think the numbers actually make sense from a shareholder-value standpoint.
Management consultant Peter Cohan says these CEOs have been doing the right thing -- cutting costs to align the money going out with the money coming in.
COHAN: It is difficult to fire 6,000 people. It does help companies survive, so I think that you should be rewarding CEOs for doing that.
Sarah Anderson says that favors short-term profits over future prosperity.
ANDERSON: There's growing evidence that mass layoffs have serious long-term costs.
Like poor morale, and having to hire and retrain again when the economy turns around.
I'm Mitchell Hartman for Marketplace.
Take Action: Stop Executive Excess!
http://www.ips-dc.org/campaigns/ceo/index.php
Read the full report here:
Some of these responses remind me of the glib "Ask the person the on the street" satires from the Onion. But that is waht the Onion does, takes an idea to its sanely illogical conclusion.
http://www.theonion.com/articles/earths-moon-shrinking,17948/
The problem I have with this story is that it just skims the surface of this crucial issue and doesn't provide any depth whatsoever. No attempt to examine this with any judgement or analysis.
But, then, that's the modus operandi for this show. Spend 1 to 2 minutes max on a story and leave everyone listening to it sitting on the same side of the fence they were already occupying. Pro-private enterprise all-the-way folks: great deal for the shareholders and profits. Lay those employess off. For the lets-consider-the workers folks: maybe finding ways to retain workers and grow profits steadily is the long term best thing to do. After all these companies do need consumers who can buy their products and services, don't they?
We are fast becoming a plutarchy in this country. Makes that post about Infinite Debt from May 2009 by labor lawyer Thomas Geoghegan even more prescient and thought-provoking. Now that's a long term view. Maybe you ought to revisit that one.
