Georgia Republican David Perdue isn't just an outsourcer and a pay discriminator, he's also supremely selfish. The New York Times points out that, in the same deposition in which Perdue so lovingly detailed his outsourcing experience, he also went into quite a bit of detail about his efforts to squeeze every possible dime in pay out of Pillowtex, the company he helmed as it went under, costing 7,600 jobs:
“I just didn’t feel like the board and Oaktree were sensitive to the vulnerability that I was in,” the multimillionaire executive told lawyers in 2005, referring to Pillowtex, a North Carolina-based textile maker, and Oaktree Capital Management, the company’s largest financial backer.
“From my perspective, this thing had totally blown up in my face. The equity that I walked away from, the stock at Reebok continued to go up. This thing was not what it had been represented to me to be,” he complained.
As his company was heading toward bankruptcy, Mr. Perdue pressed the board for a $700,000 payout to cover taxes he owed on a signing bonus and $100,000 for a relocation he never actually took. He received both, as well as a $500,000 stipend to stay on during final, failed takeover negotiations that could have rescued Pillowtex. He announced his resignation that spring, effective after a two-week paid vacation.
Poor guy! Stock at Reebok had continued to go up and there was David Perdue, stuck with the kind of piffling signing bonus that leaves you with $700,000 in taxes. Taxes, people! It's terrible.
Again, we're talking about a situation where thousands of people lost their jobs. Most of them didn't even have seven-figure signing bonuses to fall back on. But David Perdue—who was the highest-paid executive in the "home fashions" industry in 2002, as Pillowtex was going under—was concerned about himself, not the workers under him. Probably his years as an outsourcing professional had given him plenty of experience at not giving a damn about American workers losing their jobs.
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David Perdue may be an extra-special Mitt Romney-style Republican who actually made millions as a job-killer, but his disdain for working people is Republican through and through, whether you're talking about Wisconsin's Scott Walker or Maine's Paul LePage.