Want a job where you can fail and still get paid lavishly? Try corporate CEO... Spare a thought this Labor Day holiday, when you fire up the barbecue for the last weekend of the summer and raise a beer for the workers in this country, for some of the notable men who have lost their jobs over the past 20 years. I'm thinking of Richard Fuld, Dennis Kozlowski and Eckhard Pfeiffer.
They aren't union leaders who were fired for organizing for better wages or men who lost their jobs to sweatshop labor in Bangladesh. They aren't even the engineers who have been put out to rust by robot-run assembly lines. They don't really number among the almost 20 million who are estimated to be unemployed or underemployed <http://robertreich.org/post/42027318818>. No, these three names popped up in a review of the "Bailed Out, Booted and Busted" -- a study released Wednesday <http://www.ips-dc.org/reports/executive_excess_2013> by the Institute of Policy Studies in Washington DC of the 241 people who have ranked as the highest paid CEOs in the US in the past two decades. An astonishing 38% of these titans of finance and industry have either been kicked out of their jobs, put in jail or had to have their companies be rescued from bankruptcy. Fuld, Kozlowski and Pfeiffer are three that top the list. "Outrageous pay packets seem to encourage outrageous behavior," says Sarah Anderson, one of the authors of the new report. Fuld raked in $466.3m in salary and stocks in seven years as CEO of Lehman Brothers, the Wall Street investment bank, before the company collapsed in September 2008, precipitating the last financial crisis <http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=5965360&page=1>. He's just one of 112 such CEOs whose companies were given a total of $258bn in taxpayer bailouts. Kozlowski ran Tyco, a conglomerate which bought companies that did everything from laying undersea fiber-optic cables to making fire-fighting foam, from 1992 to 2002. He paid himself $170m in 1999 and $125m in 2000. Found guilty of systematically looting the company in 2005, he was sent to jail, and is now serving time at a minimum-security facility <http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324436104578581770520242996.html> near Central Park in Manhattan. He joins 18 other top paid CEOs in the past 20 years that have led companies that were "busted" or ordered to pay more than $100m each for fraud-related fines and settlements. Then there's Pfeiffer, who ran Compaq computer from 1992 to 1999, and was fired when his company lost business to rivals Dell and Gateway. Like 27 other CEOs on the list, he was smart enough to have given himself a generous "golden parachute" contract, allowing him to walk away with $416m in compensation <http://www.businessinsider.com/the-worst-ceos-in-american-history-2010-5?op=1> on his final payday . [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------------------------------------- LAAMN: Los Angeles Alternative Media Network --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe: <mailto:[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe: <mailto:[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Digest: <mailto:[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Help: <mailto:[email protected]?subject=laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Post: <mailto:[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive1: <http://www.egroups.com/messages/laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive2: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/laamn/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/laamn/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: [email protected] [email protected] <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [email protected] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
