He apologized, but he's still an a-hole.
After
making "distressed babies" into a derogatory hashtag overnight, and creating massive backlash among employees and in the media, AOL's CEO Tim Armstrong
reversed course on the retirement benefits cut that started the fiasco. The company had announced that they were going to start paying out the company's contribution to employees' 401(k) plans in a lump sum at the end of the year. That could mean that employees stock gains during the year would be lost, and that people who left the company mid-year would lose out entirely. That's history.
Armstrong also apologized to his employees and to the families of the two "distressed babies" he brought up in the call as justification for this benefits cut. The mother of one of those babies (her husband works for AOL) wrote this article for Slate, blasting Armstrong.
I take issue with how he reduced my daughter to a “distressed baby” who cost the company too much money. How he blamed the saving of her life for his decision to scale back employee benefits. How he exposed the most searing experience of our lives, one that my husband and I still struggle to discuss with anyone but each other, for no other purpose than an absurd justification for corporate cost-cutting.
Armstrong should be fired for that violation of his employees' privacy, or at the very least sued. What Armstrong still hasn't apologized for or explained is how in the hell, in a company with more than 5,000 employees, the health care costs of just two could be so expensive to the company. It's something that has had health care and insurance experts scratching their heads over since Thursday, and there's
still really no way anyone can come up with to figure out how AOL's bill for two families could be so high. The only possibility is that Armstrong purchased completely junk insurance for the company, a decision that would have made headlines long before this story blew up. That scenario is highly unlikely, and AOL isn't releasing any information about how it provides health insurance.
Armstrong also didn't explain how Obamacare cost the company $7.1 million, his other justification for the benefits cut. There's nothing new in the law that has resulted in that massive of a new expenditure. Armstrong just made that up, because he's like so many asshole CEOs before him—blaming every business decision that is going to hurt workers but save the company a lot of money on Obamacare. But at least this one got publicly shamed for it.