Rally Shines Light on Pfizer CEO’s Greed

by James Parks, Apr 27, 2006

If you bought $100 in Pfizer stock in 2000, your investment today would be worth $55.70. While the company’s stock is tanking, CEO Henry McKinnell has the biggest guaranteed pension in the United States—worth $6.52 million a year or a lottery-winning-sized lump sum payment of $83 million—according to the AFL-CIO’s 2006 Executive PayWatch. The information is based on Pfizer’s 2006 proxy statement. 

Carrying signs saying “Give It Back Hank!”, hundreds of union members rallied outside Pfizer’s annual meeting April 27 in Lincoln, Neb., to tell company stockholders  McKinnell not only has cost the company big bucks in stock devaluation but that he is a leader in the fight to deny pensions to others. McKinnell chairs the Business Roundtable, a major backer of efforts to privatize Social Security. 

“It’s important to bring the message to the public about how CEOs are looking out for themselves and not anybody else,” say Ken Mass, president of the Nebraska State AFL-CIO. “Health care costs for workers are going up and prescription drug prices are going up. It’s time we let people know what’s going on and how unfair it is.”  

Said AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka:

Outrageous CEO pay and pensions hurt working families, whose life savings and retirements are invested in companies like Pfizer. At a time when working Americans are losing their pensions left and right, working people are shocked by the size of these CEOs‘ unjustified golden retirements.

The Lincoln demonstration is right on time, because Wall Street has not given up on the big profits it could make if President Bush’s plan to switch Social Security to private pension accounts is enacted. Despite a New York Times/CBS News poll released this month showing that barely 25 percent of Americans approved of President Bush’s handling of Social Security while 62 percent disapproved of it, the Business Roundtable’s President John Castellani this week continued to push privatization, according to The Hill newspaper:  

“We’ve told the White House to get more fully behind Social Security reform,” Castellani said when asked if the White House had pressured his organization of CEOs to press harder for Social Security reform, “The White House really does not have anything concrete. Now is the time to come forward with something concrete.”

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