hrworld.com — As if financial security for multiple lifetimes isn't enough, many top corporate executives are also treated to the kinds of lavish perks that the average company employee can barely comprehend, much less ever hope to enjoy.
Aug 5, 2008 View in Crawl 4
Closed AccountAug 6, 2008
“It is the impossibility of living by any other means that compels our farm labourers to till the soil whose fruits they will not eat, and our masons to construct buildings in which they will not live. It is want that drags them to those markets where they await masters who will do them the kindness of buying them. It is want that compels them to go down on their knees to the rich man in order to get from him permission to enrich him… what effective gain [has] the suppression of slavery brought? He is free, you say. Ah! That is his misfortune… These men, it is said, have no master—they have one, and the most terrible, the most imperious of masters, that is, need. It is this that reduces them to the most cruel dependence. They live only by hiring out their arms. They must therefore find someone to hire them, or die of hunger. Is that to be free?”-Simon Linguet, 1767The idea is to provide everyone some sort of chance at this type of lifestyle.CEO compensation is way beyond incentivizing. People have always been plenty motivated to become CEO. The recent explosion in compensation was more about rewarding the people who were already there, than about attracting the best people.Boards often claim high rewards are necessary to retain the services of Joe Executive, with the implication that if we only pay him $60 million, he'll be lured away by a company willing to pay $80 million. But this presupposes that Joe Executive actually has some unusual talent, and more often than not, the evidence for this is lacking. When every major company in a given industry is performing roughly the same, that's pretty strong evidence that the management at any particular firm is not as indispensable as is claimed.That said, I have no problem with super-high compensation for truly exceptional talent. But that is simply not what is going on in corporate America. Average talent is getting rewarded enormously, simply because they can get away with it.This isn't about the government. This is about Mary K. Stockholder waking up and fighting for what is rightfully hers.
raypughAug 6, 2008
The principal at my elementary school used to have a lot of perks. Most involved sickening child abuse though, so you don't want to hear about them (he raped me)