Lynn Stuart Parramore at Al Jazeera on why wee need to shame Americas greedy CEOs: -Erika Does trumpeting scoundrels’ misdeeds set them straight? Edward Lampert, chairman and CEO of Sears Holdings, received positive reviews from only 20 percent of employees in a list compiled by the financial news website 24/7 Wall St. from reviews posted on the job community site Glassdoor. The scores reflect employee ire about low compensation and limited shifts, endured while Lampert luxuriated in a $38.4 million palace in Florida. Such widespread discontent, coupled with outrage over his failure to address aging infrastructure and internal systems, have made him the lowest-rated chief executive in America. Various mainstream media outlets, including Time magazine, ran stories highlighting the news. Lampert, who has been criticized in Bloomberg Businessweek and elsewhere for pitting company units against one another in a Lord of the Flies–style death match, captured the No. 2 spot on Forbes’ list of America’s worst CEOs in 2012 and ranked third in the magazine’s roundup of worst CEO screw-ups for 2013. Yet Sears is still slowly disintegrating under Lampert’s management. Thousands of layoffs and more than 100 store closings were announced just in time for the holidays. Since the 2008 financial crisis, Americans have increasingly noticed that many business practices don’t seem to jibe with their social and moral values. There’s little doubt that a substantial shift in business norms over the last few decades has transformed actions once considered outrageous into ordinary or even desirable strategies. Take mass layoffs. IBM CEOs once cherished a policy of keeping workers for life, boasting as late as the 1980s that the company had never laid off an employee since 1921. Today CEOs often jettison thousands of highly trained, dedicated workers without batting an eye — in the name of cost cutting and boosting stock prices — though many point to the negative consequences of these maneuvers. IBM now refers to showing the employees the door as rebalancing its workforce. Layoffs, poor stewardship and awarding themselves gigantic paychecks — these are the kinds of actions that drive employees to vent their anger at CEOs on sites such as Glassdoor. What is common today in American corporations certainly would have made our parents gasp: According to a report by the Economic Policy Institute, the average CEO-to-worker compensation ratio grew from just 20 to 1 in 1965 to nearly 300 to 1 in 2013. In 2012, J.C. Penney Co. CEO Ronald Johnson took home more than $53 million, while his average employee earned less than $30,000. That’s a pay ratio of 1,795 to 1. His pay was not based on performance; his tenure was so disastrous that he was ousted in 2013. It’s no secret that America’s corporate leaders routinely award themselves mind-boggling sums for performance ranging from average to awful — all while shifting the costs of their mistakes onto taxpayers and demanding subsidies as they shirk taxes. A growing sense of public indignation has been percolating over these developments, with news outlets and unions publicizing lists that sometimes include photographs of the highest-paid CEOs.
Posted on: Wed, 24 Dec 2014 18:26:00 +0000
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