Spotting corporate hypocrisy and fake solidarity
This spring, numerous CEOs made
headlines by showing some class solidarity. If we’re having to wallop our
workers because of a pandemic, these bosses told media interviewers, the least
we can do is cut our own salaries.
Yes — all in this together! Only…
not really.
An analytical firm looked at the books of nearly
all major U.S. corporations, finding that a mere fraction had made any cuts to
senior executive pay. The few that did only made little nicks in the boss’s
take-home, rather than real cuts.
The trick is that the “sacrifices”
only applied to official salaries. They are the tiniest part of a chief
executive’s compensation, which mostly is made up of bonuses, stock options,
etc.
For example, United Airlines, which is presently zeroing out the paychecks of 36,000 workers, docked its CEO’s salary by nearly a third — which sounds like a real gesture, but that works out to less than three percent of the $22 million he’s getting in total pay.
So middle-income workers get the
boot, while the boss still has his job, gets more than $21 million in annual
pay, and claims bragging rights for being an “ethical” corporate chieftain.
The ethical crime here is not merely
in the cynical fudging of numbers, but that even in this unprecedented time of
national crisis, the elites who’ve converted capitalism into a system of
plutocratic plunder still feel entitled to cheat.
If a nation’s economic system
doesn’t care about shared sacrifice in hard times and shared prosperity in good
times, why should the majority who pay the price and are denied the gains care
about that economic system?
OtherWords columnist Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer, and public speaker. Distributed by OtherWords.org.