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jonnyfishon -> RE: these guys worked hard..... (5/2/2008 12:47:51 AM)
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Overall, CEOs were paid 15 percent less last year, but they still make more than 10 times the amount they did two decades ago. In 1980, the average CEO once made 40 times what the average worker makes. Now it's 433 times, and many CEOs get paid handsomely, even if they fail.
When Gary Forsee, the CEO of Sprint, was fired, he got $40 million, an $84,000-a-month pension for life, and help finding a new job as a university president.
Weinberg said it's all evidence that, in the business world, "the game is rigged" in favor of CEOs. But some say there have been major reforms in recent years and that most CEOs are fairly compensated.
John Castellani, president of the Business Round Table, said that evaluating CEO performance is more complex than Forbes makes it out to be.
"The outliers are just that — outliers. You have to look at the preponderance of CEOs and how they're performing and how their pay matched performance."
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But Weinberg says the examples in his article show there need to be serious changes before CEOs are no longer paid for failure. Most notably, he says, shareholders should be able to vote on who sits on corporate boards, something the Securities and Exchange Commission proposed, but corporate leaders fought tooth and nail to defeat.
"It's called shareholder democracy right, and that's what we need in this country," Weinberg said. "We have something more akin to [President Vladimir] Putin in Russia right now than we do to a representative democracy."
Only when there's democracy in corporate America, he says, will the playing field truly be level.
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