When is someone going to put a stop to this before the entire nation implodes? Today's outrage du jour is CEO compensation totaled $598 million at the 50 companies that laid off the most workers:
The 50 U.S. chief executives who laid off the most employees between November 2008 and April 2010 eliminated a total of 531,363 jobs, according to the Institute for Policy Studies, a research group that works for social justice and against wealth concentration.
In “CEO Pay and the Great Recession,” the institute said the $598 million in combined pay for the 50 executives would have paid one month’s worth of average-sized unemployment benefits for each of the laid-off workers.
The top 50 layoff firms reported a 44 percent average profit increase for 2009, the report said.
“These numbers all reflect a broader trend in Great Recession-era Corporate America: the relentless squeezing of worker jobs, pay and benefits to boost corporate earnings and maintain corporate executive paychecks at their recent bloated levels,” the authors wrote.
Is that what it takes to be a corporate leader? The ability to screw anybody, anytime and put the money in their own pockets?
When else in history have we seen this? What happened when the people had enough?
Fred Hassan, former CEO of Schering-Plough, presided over announced layoffs affecting 16,000 workers after a 2009 merger with Merck. He resigned after the merger, receiving “golden parachute” compensation in 2009 of more than $49.6 million to rank as the highest-paid layoff leader.
The top five companies announcing the most layoffs for the study period were General Motors (75,733); Citigroup (52,175); Bank of America (35,000); Caterpillar (27,499) and Verizon (21,308).
GRRRRRR
A picture is worth a thousand word's.I am a History Buff and anytime it get's this bad if I were one of these scumbag's I would be buying an Island. But their smugness and indifference to the plight of the people they lay off for profit will be their downfall.The worst is GM,more importantly our elected official's for looking the other way for year's while they outsoarced job's since the seventy's.All you have to type in companies owned by GM,for most reading this blog I am sure know this has been an orchestrated plan to take the blame off a business that want's to sell us lemon's.I could go on and on but being a person that recieved a G.E.D. from a juvenile detention center I'll let more educated folk's do that for the rest of us.
Frank Rutherford