Boeing Exec Says $3.7 Mil Not Enough
 |
Boeing Co. Executive Vice President and General Counsel Michael Luttig pulled in $3.7 million in compensation in 2009. That’s a whopping 34 percent increase from 2008—and it came during a major recession.
Meanwhile, as Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) pointed out during a hearing yesterday (see video) on the shrinking American middle class, Boeing’s workers have seen just a 3 percent increase in their average compensation over the past 20 years!
Harkin, chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, wanted to know that if things were going so swimmingly for Boeing that Luttig could pocket a 34 percent pay hike,
Why shouldn’t employees have a share of that? I’m just asking about fairness for workers.
Luttig turned to the old let’s-duck-the-question-with-a-little-humor dodge. But his lame attempt at humor just showed how out of touch he is with the real-life, middle-class problem of stagnant wages.
2011 PayWatch: Average CEO Salary–$11.4 Million
 |
While 25 million unemployed and underemployed U.S. workers are drowning, CEO pay skyrocketed by 23 percent, for an average salary of $11.4 million in 2010, according to the AFL-CIO Executive PayWatch. Released today, data compiled at PayWatch also show CEOs have done little to create badly-needed jobs, instead sitting on a record $1.93 trillion in cash on their balance sheets.
The 2011 Executive PayWatch features the compensation of 299 S&P 500 company CEOs and provides direct comparisons between those CEOs and the median pay of nurses, teachers, firefighters and others. For instance, while a secretary makes a median annual salary of $29,980, someone like Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf rakes in $18,973,722 million—632 times the secretary’s salary. The pay gap between Wall Street and Main Street has widened egregiously—as recently as 1980, CEOs made 42 times that of blue-collar workers.
(Check out the 2011 Executive PayWatch to read case studies of six CEOs and find out how many firefighters it takes to make the salary of one CEO. You also can compare salaries of nurses, secretaries and others with CEOs and share the results with your friends on Facebook. Click here to share on Facebook.)
Maybe CEOs can’t focus on job creation because they have more pressing issues—like lobbying to repeal key provisions of a financial disclosure reform bill Congress passed last year. The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act requires corporations to reveal the CEO-to-worker pay gap—and the Wall Street rulers don’t want to do that. (Click here to urge your member of Congress not to weaken Wall Street reform in any way.)
Don’t Let the Chamber and Big Biz Gut Workers’ Say on CEO Pay
 |
|
With trillions of dollars in pension funds, the collective power of working people’s money can begin to rein in the out-of-control CEO pay that is hurting shareholders and the economy as a whole. But a new law to hold the financial industry accountable is already in danger.
According to the AFL-CIO Executive PayWatch, a CEO of a Standard & Poor’s (S&P) 500 index company was paid, on average, $9.25 million in total compensation in 2009. At the same time, millions of workers lost their jobs, their homes and their retirement savings in the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.
The Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable and other Big Business groups are lobbying hard for changes that would protect that exorbitant CEO pay by gutting the new law’s “say on pay” provisions, before they even begin.
Wall Street’s Lobbying On Financial Reform Can’t Duck 2010 PayWatch Spotlight
 |
|
Be sure to be here tomorrow when the 2010 AFL-CIO Executive PayWatch shines its spotlight on Wall Street’s Big Six: Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo/Wachovia.
The six banks, which received billions of dollars from the Treasury Department’s Troubled Assets Relief Program, now are spending millions of dollars to lobby on financial reform in Congress.
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka will host a live webcast at noon EDT tomorrow to review the new data and outline plans to enact real financial regulatory reform and make Wall Street pay for job creation through a financial speculation tax. Click here for more information on the webcast.
2010 PayWatch Spotlights Wall Street’s Effort to Block Financial Reform
|
|
Think you’re angry now about CEO bonuses, bailouts and the wheeling and dealing of Big Banks on Wall Street?
Just wait until Tuesday, April 13. The AFL-CIO 2010 Executive PayWatch launches that day, and it will spotlight Wall Street’s Big Six: Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo/Wachovia. Each stuck its hands out for the billions of dollars of corporate welfare under the Treasury Department’s Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP)—and now is using our taxpayer money to pay multimillion-dollar bonuses and, even worse, to lobby against financial reform in Congress to ensure they can continue to get away with economic murder.
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka will highlight a live webcast at noon EST the same day to review the new data and outline plans to enact real financial regulatory reform and make Wall Street pay for job creation through a financial speculation tax.
Bailed-out CEOs Pocket Millions, Lay off Hundreds of Thousands
 |
|
Executives of banks that were bailed out with taxpayer dollars have pulled down stock options that guarantee them mega-million-dollar windfalls for years to come.
Worse, they’re using our taxpayer money to line their own pockets while laying off workers. Since Jan. 1, 2008, the top 20 financial industry recipients of bailout aid have together laid off more than 160,000 employees. In 2008, the 20 CEOs at these firms each averaged $13.8 million in compensation, for a collective total of over $250 million.
According to a report by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), the top five executives at 10 of the top 20 banks that have accepted the most federal bailout dollars received a combined increase in the value of their stock options of nearly $90 million.
Says Sarah Anderson, lead author of “America’s Bailout Barons,” part of IPS’s Executive Excess series:
America’s executive pay bubble remains unpopped. And these outrageous rewards give executives an incentive to behave outrageously, putting the rest of us at risk.
CEOs Protected by Big Contracts Make Sure Their Employees Aren’t
The AFL-CIO’s new Executive PayWatch data shows that many CEOs and top execs have contracts that give them high pay, job security and numerous benefits. Yet these same executives are fighting a vicious battle to prevent their workers from having an opportunity to get workplace contracts by opposing passage of the Employee Free Choice Act.
A big double standard is at work here—corporations are giving generous contracts to top execs with one hand while suppressing workers’ freedom to form unions with the other.
Take Wal-Mart, one of the most active opponents of the Employee Free Choice Act and its workers’ freedom to form unions. Wal-Mart went so far as to warn store managers not to vote for Obama last fall, and former Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott summed up corporate opposition to Employee Free Choice like this:
We like driving the car and we’re not going to give the steering wheel to anybody but us.
Executive PayWatch: CEO Perks Rise as Workers’ Wages, Jobs Wilt
 |
|
Even as the U.S. economy went into a tailspin, the median salary for CEOs of 200 large corporations increased by 4.5 percent to $1.08 million. On top of that, these corporations keep plying executives with generous freebies, despite the public outcry over private jets and other executive perks.
The 2009 AFL-CIO Executive PayWatch site, which launches today, points out that the perks for executives rose on average by 12.5 percent in 2008 to $336,248—or nine times the median salary of a full-time worker. Even more appalling is the practice of rewarding executives who drive their companies into the ground.
For example, the site reports that in 2007—the year the financial crisis began to unfold—the top 10 recipients of the federal government’s Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) collectively paid their CEOs a combined $242 million in total annual compensation. That averages nearly $25 million per CEO to run companies that might have gone bankrupt if not for billions of dollars in taxpayer assistance.
