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Two stories yesterday hit me like a cold mackerel slap to my face. One headline read: "Most outrageous CEO perks of 2006 -- so far". The other simply proclaimed: "Increasing deaths may point to peril in Texas jobs"
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LINK The perk-fest lives on. So far this year, execs have gotten a bevy of sweet deals that would make former Tyco International (TYC, news, msgs) CEO Dennis Kozlowski proud.
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* The new finance chief at eBay (EBAY, news, msgs) will get up to $700,000 if he can't get the price he wants for the Texas house he gave up to take his job with eBay in California.
* A new president at Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide (HOT, news, msgs) will get $1.5 million for airfare during his first year on the job. The money is meant to help him commute to work in New York so he can keep his home in California while his son finishes high school there.
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"What we have is a major crisis in America with ineffective directors," agrees Don Hodges, president of the Hodges Fund (HDPMX, news, msgs). "When they become directors, they join the country club, so to speak. They forget they are working for shareholders. Probably 85% of them feel like they work for the CEO, so they lay down on the job and give away large chunks of the company."
What struck me about this account was it pure brazenness. After all the revelation of excess, after Enron and Tyco, the abuses go on. It is literally true that the greedy can't help themselves. Like any other addiction, until the abuser acknowledges his habit, there can be no talk of an end to the abuse. It is ever so, in an environment of corporate enterprise run amuck, these boards and their CEO's literally can't help themselves. They will have to be stopped by some outside intervention - stockholders, regulators, someone for they will not stop themselves.
The imbalance in power between these pigs feeding at the trough and the rest of the world is starkly made when we examine the other story that caught my attention:
LINK According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 495 Texans died on the job in 2005, a 12.5 percent increase from the previous year, when 440 Texans lost their lives.
In stark contrast, the national on-the-job death toll fell 1 percent between 2004 and 2005.
Although the nation saw a drop in the number of deaths last year as the result of transportation accidents, assaults, contact with objects, falls, fires and explosions, Texas spiked in nearly every category.
But the biggest contributor to the jump was an increase in the number of Texans who died from fires and explosions and exposure to harmful substances and environments.
We must tip our hat to Good Hair, he runs a mean plantation. In Perryworld, regulation is a dirty word, spin is everything. So the gov has been touting the economic prosperity of the state. What goes unmentioned is the cost paid by workers for that "prosperity". It is no accident, (pun intended) that Texas leads in this horrific category. We are one of the worst in corporate regulation. In turn the ethics of campaign which I blogged about here helps to explain why.
Note in particular the categories of accidents that gave us our horrific honors. Fires and explosions will happen, plants are not Sunday schools, but they happen to often . Recall BP's continuing problem. Recall the arrogance written into Texas law that permits them to literally investigate themselves.
I teach for a living, and a student in class underscored how far we have fallen. He asked, "Can unions be considered evil factions?" There is evidence ( see here ) for a revival of unions. It can't come a minute too soon. For all of their limitations, we need a strong union movement as part of the grass roots, populists push back against the insanity of Perryworld, Bushworld, where greedy individuals can amplify the harm of their addictions to material wealth at the expense of the rest of us. The cost for NOT regulating and holding them accountable in Texas is literally a matter of life and death.