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IBM Europe Workers Strike
csimoes writes "IBM employees in Europe are on
strike today. This is in response to the 10,000-13,000 job cuts that IBM is planning, most of them in Europe. Strikers will be wearing black and blue to signify their struggle. Here is their main union web site. Now I can't say I'm big union guy, but they do make some interesting points on their site. Such as: "IBM is a wealthy and successful company. Its first quarter profit for 2005 was $1.4 billion, and $9 billion for the whole of 2004. It increased the dividend to its shareholders, recently bought back $5 billion in IBM stock, and acquired 19 companies in 2004." The union also questions if other cost cutting mechanisms could achieve the same effect without cutting so may jobs."
They could save a ton by doing so...
Isn't their job to be certain they can provide profit in the future for their shareholders (the owners of the company). Why would a company want to keep 10~13K employees that are obviously not necessary in the daily business? Simply because they are making a profit?
I'm not a fan of layoffs either but a company is there to make money, nothing else. If these 10~13K people banded together and started a competing company maybe they could make IBM pay in that direction. In the end employment is voluntary. I don't hear people screaming about someone quitting IBM when they take their experiences there and help another company use that knowledge. What about all the training and investment IBM made in those people, do they think it was free?
Seems like every time I'm in Europe there is a major strike happening.
"The union also questions if other cost cutting mechanisms could achieve the same effect without cutting so may jobs.""
Give upper-managment a pay cut.
Corporations should have some social responsibility attached to their privilages - after all they are granted permission to exist by the people.
No 'make work' jobs should be encouraged, it's just a waste of economic resource, but strongly suggesting to such companies that they should look into retraining and redeploying their workers rather than just firing them en mass would be a good idea as the shock of such large events can permanently damage communities and economies.
That and I seriously hope the board of IBM is taking a huge pay cut. Lead by example and all that.
Beep beep.
...if even one goes missing, he spends ages searching for it.
IBM make so much money because they keep themselves efficient. If you stop doing that, you eventually stop making money. It's not reasonable to argue "we're doing well now, so we don't need to fire people". Anyways, since these are the people who are going to lose their jobs, you can know a priori their perception of the state of the company is biased; they'd be inhuman for it not to be.
Personally, my take in this is very simple; you enter into a contract with another person (a company, as it happens, in this case, which makes no difference) and either of you are free to behave as you like as long as you honour your contract.
It is improper for one individual to use extraordinary means (going on strike in this case) because they don't like what the other person is doing, when they've agreed to the contract between them.
--
Toby
Yes, so IBM is trimming the most expensive european divisions. Welcome to outsourcing. Of course those workers will go on a pretty generous european dole.
Not that I see much problem with that dole. I used to, but then I looked around in my country and I'm seeing all my tax dollars fall out of bomb bays and literally going up in smoke, all to support some stupid politician's lies. I just can't honestly say a welfare state is any more inefficient or evil than that.
YES. I've been saying this forever. A public company can't be content with constistently doing a great job and providing a good service. They have to always be growing, growing, growing. That's why we end up with all these mega-mergers. The system is the problem if you ask me. Google will clearly be the next major victim of this vicious cycle.
Have you ever asked yourself, Is It Normal?.
IBM just wants to make it's profit even bigger. By employing Indian's and sacking European's, they are doing just that.
Sad but true.
I'm a grassroot programmer.
And I feel bad about the general situation for programmers and loss of jobs in Europe and the U.S.
But their arguments aren't going to fly.
The workers say: The company is making money. Well, the company is constantly trying to make more money. Management will never keep people on the payroll just because they can afford it.
The workers say: There are other ways to save that amount of money. The managements reply will be great. What are they? Will do them too.
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
Yes, IBM may be profitable now, but that means nothing. IBM depends on long-term trends and long-term plans. If the company can't win service contracts or lets Dell get corporate contracts for servers, the impact isn't noticeable for several quarters or even years. That is why IBM is taking action now.
The point is that smart companies don't wait for trouble, they solve problems before anyone thinks they have a problem. If anything, IBM may even be late to the "solving" stage. Q1 2005 was not pretty for IBM because the future prospects looked dimmer than expected.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
To say that "IBM is a wealthy company" with "$9 billion in profit in 2004 is completely misleading. What IBM made in absolute dollars is not really relevant.
Let's say I offer you an investment. If you give me $X, I'll give you $X + 100 a year from now. What a great deal - you are guaranteed a profit. How could you possibly turn that deal down?
Sure, it's great if X = 100. Then you'll make a 100% return in one year. Cool.
What if X = 1,000,000,000. You give me a billion today, and I'll give you 1,000,000,100 in a year. Suddenly it doesn't sound like such a good idea, does it?
IBM made about $4.87 per share last year. At the current share price ($76.51), that means IBM's return was about 6.4%. Not too shabby, but not really all that great when risk-adjusted.
In fact, IBM's share price has gotten RIPPED in the last few months. A year ago it was trading ~90, which gives us a return of only about 5.4% - not very impressive.
Sure, $9 billion seems like a lot, until you realize how much capital is being employed to generate that $9B. And how many shareholders need to divide that up. Shareholders like pension funds, university endowments, and widows and orphans.
I'm not saying the workers are wrong here, I'm just pointing out that it's completely fallacious to call IBM a "rich company" just because it made a large number of absolute dollars last year. That money comes from or goes to someone - to everyone who holds an indexed mutual fund, for example.
Does this look familiar? US union, Euopean issue. YEt another attempt by the CWA to organize industries that have little interest in unions.
Domain ID:D9294190-LROR
Domain Name:ALLIANCEIBM.ORG
Created On:20-Aug-1999 14:42:38 UTC
Last Updated On:15-Apr-2005 14:30:15 UTC
Expiration Date:20-Aug-2006 14:42:38 UTC
Sponsoring Registrar:Network Solutions LLC (R63-LROR)
Status:CLIENT TRANSFER PROHIBITED
Registrant ID:5621098-NSI
Registrant Name:Communications Workers of Amer
Registrant Organization:Communications Workers of Amer
Registrant Street1:Attn. Beth Allen
Registrant Street2:501 3rd Street NW
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Registrant Email:ballen@cwa-union.org
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
I just saw Roger and Me, a Michael Moore film where he criticizes GM for laying off workers in Flint Michigan. He starts the movie showing the place where the UAW had a major victory in the 30s, but didn't seem to see the connection between the union activity and the fact that the plant were being closed in Flint because Mexican workers will do the same job for much less. American and Eurpoean workers have been priced themselves out of the market. To continue receiving these exorbitant salaries, they need to be more productive than people who are willing to work for less.
Vote for Pedro
There may have been some dead wood in the company that needed to be culled, but quite a lot of those people are brown nosers who have figured out how to misrepresent their skills to managers who have no technical experience. Laying off massive amounts of people, hoping to cull these folks is like playing a shell game. It ain't working. It's demoralizing the employees that are left and the people with real talent are jumping ship...fed up with over work, pathetic management, endless meetings, and not enough talent left to actually implement designs.
So...if that's the results of appeasing stock holders here in the states, why in the world would you want to do the same thing in Europe? Yeah, there's a lot of peple just getting by; never really doing anything. But if management is not competent to figure that out and the en masse layoffs to get rid of them are failing and demoralizing...then you're possibly causing more harm than good by doing it.
IBM is too full of processes, too top heavy (duh as if y'all didn't know that already), and people are constanty job hopping in the company every year or two (or being restructured) with the result that no one know how the hell to do their job.
So, um, doesn't Intel lay off 5% of their employees every year? So why is it different when IBM does it?
Agreed. Most Americans seem to feel resentful about Europeans because we don't let employers walk all over us. If a US corporation wants to have a branch in Europe, they have to deal with European work views. They don't get to import the US view of work your emplyees like slaves then fire them when they complain. IBM can either accept this or piss off back where they came from.
And remember, your taxes/tribute cover unemployment checks.
Bet you aint 50 yet.
CorpGovMedia has most Americans so stupified, I doubt they can even imagine it. Not to mention that our treasonous politicians have already crippled the legal foundation of unionism.....
eat shiat and bark at the moon
Profitability
Profit Margin (ttm): 8.51%
Operating Margin (ttm): 11.02%
Management Effectiveness
Return on Assets (ttm): 7.97%
Return on Equity (ttm): 27.82%
A 10 year note yields about 4.1% and was over 4.5%
earlier this year and is risk free. Certainly people
who invest in IBM are taking risk. What profit margin
do our friends in Euroland think is fair for the company
that employs them to earn?
Believe it or not, most people do not take jobs based simply on salary. They consider the benefits package, location, and a host of other factors. It's very common - in the States anyway - for someone to take a lower-paying job because it doesn't require him to move or because it has a better health insurance program. The employee says, "It'll cost me $X to move and get insurance on my own, and that's more than the amount I'm 'losing' by taking the lower-paying job. So this is the best job to take."
It helps out the employee by letting him choose the best job for his unique situation; it helps the employer by giving it the freedom to offer the package it can afford. Thus people who are maybe "marginal" applicants can get jobs where otherwise they couldn't (because nobody could afford to take a chance on them). That's how I got my job. No severance package, retirement, or anything else, but in exchange I got a job, with zero experience, that usually needs five years of experience.
Note that I'm not saying our way is better than the European way. But many Europeans don't seem to understand that there are some advantages to the free(r)-market approach, and I wanted to explain some of them.
Hmmm i moved from the UK to the US (with the same company) and didn't notice much difference in my paid vacation.
In the UK i got 30 days + xmas and new year
In the US i get 16 days + MLK Day + Memorial Day + Presidents Day + Independence Day + Day after Independence day + Labor day + Thankgiving + Day after thanksgiving + 5 days for xmas and new year.
UK Total 32 days
US Total 29 days
Plus once i hit 8 years of service i'll get another week, bringing the us total to 34.
Now i rather the european model of not giving you pointless days here and there, and actually giving you enough to take a 1 month break every year... but that's just me.
May not be the same everywhere but i'm looking at another US company that's going to offer me 30 total.
And not to mention has pledged millions in aid to other countries around the world such as Africa (what do you mean it's in patented GM crops and there are strings attached?) and the regions affected by the tsunami at christmas (you mean they didn't actually follow through on these?)
What happened 50 years ago means nothing when you're screwing up now.
Ok your company decieded to lay you off. You know what, Life Ain't Fair. The best peice of wisdom i got were those three words. A companys job is to make money plain and simple, if your company has decieded that your employment is no longer needed, time to brush off that resume and start looking around. Whats that? your too important to lose? Your the only one who knows this one thing? Guess what with a work force of 300,000 im sure i can find someone else who can figure it out and more likely than not do it better than you did. Life sucks then you die, get over it.
In any event, IBM has been downsizing for the last 10-15 years, so this is nothing new. In the early '90s they had something on the order of 1 million employees; at some point they stabilized at around 300,000 but they're still tweaking the formula (like selling off their desktop PC division).
They don't do this stuff for sadistic fun, they do it because there's no reason for them to be in markets that lose money. In my view they do have a social contract to no be complete dicks about this (like not giving people fair warning before a layoff), but at the same time they also have a contract of sorts with their shareholders and the rest of the company (yes, their own employees!) to stay successful and not slip back into the oversized bureaucratic morass that plagued them in the '80s and '90s.
Umm sorry, but that's the way it's done in Europe too. It's not like the governments assign you jobs and force you to work somewhere. It's just that they regulate some things which they believe should be the same for everybody. Like medical insurance and holidays.
I don't want to live like a Mexican peasant in a maquiladora. Neither does he; he would rather live like an American. We will BOTH be forced to enjoy the peasant lifestyle if wealth becomes too polarized, and that's what's happening. The rich are only rich at the sufferance of a populace that either cannot or will not give up its wealth to them. Democracy is the great pacifier in this regard. However, with the present oligarchical manipulation of democracy, it is failing.
Rich people tend to use their money to take money from other people (consolidation of wealth), and fundamentally this activity is antisocial and evil. Disguising it in layers of Adam Smith pie-in-the-sky theories about invisible hands and shareholders' value doesn't justify activities that harm many for the benefit of few.
Geez, these bleeding heart conservatives...
This is a classic anti-union argument, and can be quote verbatum back to the "robber barron" days of the late 1800s. On its face, it assumes that the union leadership dictates, and the rank-and-file follow like sheep, being too stupid to consider their "best" interests. If true, then one might as well eliminate the middle man since management is already perfectly capable of dictating.
On the other hand, it just might be that the rank-and-file are as capable of recognizing their best interests as a stock market is at allocating capital resources.... that is to say, usually they can, occasionally they lack 20/20 vision to think through new circumstances, and sometimes a small clique can fool everyone for a while.
Circumstances since the end of the Cold War shows that you can only count on management (and stockholders) to look after their own interests. Now that there's not even the mirage of "another way", w/in the US at least quite a few of them seem to feel that putting the screws to their employees isn't only possible, it's a mandate from the Almighty.
I'm sure that a portion of the labor pool doesn't want to work in a union shop. The size of that portion is difficult to assertain, given the tread towards smaller work sites (you're easier to single out) and legal roadblocks (in legislatures, executive branches, and courts).
Luke, help me take this mask off
"$13 million in the proceeds of a stock grant sale and options exercize to J. Bruce Harreld alone. Bruce Harreld came from Boston Market several years ago where he also helped drive that company straight into the shitter."
The US is diseased and along this line may eventually be deceased. This is something that I had observed for a long time; a short-sighted corporate culture in the US that rewards executives for self-serving, soul-sucking practices. US company after US company are being driven into the shitter; the exceptions seem mainly those companies that are run by their founders or their family, but for those in which management is recruited, there's too often a streak of executives whose sole concern is their rewards during their term, and to hell with any hint of a future for the company or anyone else. The US will pay for this, as US company after US company will fold. Look at GM and Ford suffering now thanks to the shenanigans of the 1980s and since; you could develop products that people want and grow a viable business, or you could cook the books, sacking left and right, playing with numbers to show what you want, and too often US executives have chosen the latter. It's a shame for Ford and GM; they've done every henious thing, from addresses in the Cayman Islands to blaming unions and social responsibilities and lobbying washington, eventhough their competitors in Europe and Japan face bigger social responsibitilies and higher costs of doing business, yet their companies have prospered and are taking US carmakers to the cleaners, thanks to a stricter set of legal rules that forced their executives to focus on the essential and true ways of running a company. Warren Buffet, a man whose preferred holding period for a stock is "forever", has been yelling for a while now that executives need to be disciplined by a new set of rules encoded into law; and I wholeheartedly agree.
But here's the thing. Sure, you may pay less right now for that work. But what about the long term cost?
My father, who's highly placed in a company that makes medical devices, has told me that they've sworn off outsourcing to India and instead are preferring consultants now (at less-than-stellar consulting rates). The simple truth is they tried twice to get outsourcing working, and every single time the communication obstacles hit them hard and significantly delayed schedules.
Not to mention that the code they made and the hardware interfaces they designed were way under the company's quality standards. This was less than a year and a half ago, so the experience is fairly current. They also tried two significant companies when doing this. So it's not like it was a single bad experience. In both cases, they had to scrap the work almost entirely. It cost them nearly 150% the original non-outsourcing estimate to fix.
I know there are a lot of smart Indian folks out there, but the simple truth is that in India, lots of people are jumping on the coder bandwagon to make money, just like during the dotcom bubble here. As that happens, the number of well-trained and intelligent workers per unit sample will drop.
If IBM moves the jobs elsewhere and they end up getting a crappy product that they spend a bunch of maintenance budget on, then did they really save money? Were they really justified in firing those people? Not ethically justfied, I mean justified in the eyes on the shareholders who want to make money.
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
Why should a publicly traded corporation, which is profitable, even be PERMITTED to layoff anyone? Why should the desire for higher profits be allowed to trump an employee's livlihood? Why should profitable companies be allowed to inflict hardship on their employees? Even if a company is losing money, why shouldn't they have to submit to an independent audit to determine the lowest number of layoffs needed to restore profitability? Why should corporate greed take precedence over jobs? WHY???
Not being rewarded for working harder than anyone else violates my human rights.
Chances are, you don't work harder than about 200,000,000 Chinese and about 75,000,000 Indians.
Anyone with Internet access and the leisure to post on Slashdot has a lot farther to fall than they think.
If IBM is wrong then the company will suffer and the worker will find a better job. If IBM is right they will benefit and the worker will need to get their sorry ass in gear or work at a crappier job.
. . . either way, 13000 less ably-employed consumers is bad for ALL business.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
when you are making $9 billion in profit a year it is bloody unethical to lay off the people who help make that profit
It isn't unethical if those people are just free riders. What if that $9 billion in profit was mostly because of the work of the people who didn't get laid off?? Is it ethical to to keep on extra people who aren't really contributing to that profit at the expense of those who are doing the hard work??
If those people who are laid off were contributing to that profit, I'd expect to see IBM's profits to go down in the long term. If they weren't I'd expect the profits to go up. We can wait and see what happens and find out if IBM is making a mistake... but either way they aren't being unethical.
I know what it's like to work with dead wood. And I think it's perfectly fine to get rid of the dead wood. Now, some of those laid off are probably not dead wood, but they can get another job (maybe even with IBM). Skilled, hard working people are always very hard to find.
What is unethical is how so many people think a job is an entitlement and drive whole companies under with their selfishness. When whole divisions fail, it's because of a pervasive culture of this selfishness. It's because of free rider leeches who do nothing but enrich themselves at the expense of the common good.
(bracing for negative mods... but please look up what troll and flamebait really mean before hammering away at my rant)
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
Yes, sympathy is justified. And I say this as my brother in law was just laid off. But just because we feel sorry for them - and I do - doesn't mean IBM is wrong to let them go. The unionists point to the fact that IBM is making a profit to justify their jobs. But that's irrelevant - should IBM wait until they're in the red overall to reduce their payroll? Is the situation of the overall company more important than individual divisions? What if IBM is okay but they have a division hemhorraging money? Can they get rid of that division or not?
Bottom line, there comes a time when a company needs to change direction, and unfortunately that means bad things for people. And yes, we should feel sorry for them. And yes, IBM should provide them with decent severance. But it doesn't mean that IBM has to keep them on forever.
There is definitely a pervasive looter mentality in corporate boardrooms in setting these outrageous salaries... these salaries are for the most part too high. However, barring the current abuses, good leaders should make a lot more than most other employees. There is a severe shortage of them, and they can increase profits by way more than they're paid.
Just look at Apple pre Steve Jobs vs. post Jobs. How much was his leadership worth? Apple's massively turned things around... not only protecting the jobs it had, but adding tons of new ones around the world.
Of course, since they're on such a hiring binge now they surely are not always hiring the best people... and they will probably lay off a lot of people as soon as their growth slows enough to let them do so. If such layoffs are unethical, they should not be hiring people that they don't plan on keeping around... but that sort of wrong-headed ethic would be bad for Apple and bad for the people who are going to get laid off (they wouldn't have a job right now).
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
After being through a half-dozen jobs in my life I realized that a capable person losing a job is an opportunity, not a tragedy.
Sure, if one person gets fired they'll bounce back - especially if their former employer gives them half-decent severance and all that.
On the other hand, if IBM closes down an office or otherwise terminates 2000 IT folks in the same town, there is no way that most will bounce back without relocating. No job market can absorb that many people when they have specialized jobs.
Cuts of that scale really are tragic. I'm not saying the solution is government regulation, but that doesn't mean that everything is swell either...
This assumes that you are bargaining from a position of equal strength. While this might certainly be the case, I think that more often than not the employee is at a disadvantage.
meh
These huge outsourcing moves always makes me buy, stock will soar like an eagle. And that Ukraine university grad from Minsk will finally receive the job he dreamed of and for big 5000$ dollars a year, vivat board geniuses, vivat chairman, vivat another winning stockholder move, and u know I am a Saudi/Quatar prince with 10% share slice and this brings me more dollars and also brings me closer to another sore poverty shaken European daughter I may abuse.
What should happen is that you should have to compete with people willing to work for a fraction of your income, and then the market will decide that you are overpaid.
That's the scenario we are moving to: a few very wealthy executives in the first world essentially making money off of work done by people in the third world. You think that CEO's who are making in the low 7 digits aren't getting paid enough, and that Europeans getting paid in the mid-5 digits are overpaid. I thik this suggests a kind of fascination with authority and power that has distorted any sense of fairness, or any idea that economics should serve people, not vice-versa.
And now these same critics are screaming CEOs make too much! Make up your minds.
Durrrr.
HP ejected its last CEO that nearly killed the company with $21 million in hand. Thats payment for performance?
I thik this suggests a kind of fascination with authority and power that has distorted any sense of fairness, or any idea that economics should serve people, not vice-versa.
That's like saying gravity should serve people and not vice versa!
Economics isn't just a philosophy... it's a mathematical description of reality. If economics tells you you are inefficient, then you should listen or risk going out of business... or worse yet in managed economies like North Korea and the old Soviet Union risk people starving.
If you want to have the highest possible standard of living for the most people, then you should develop a plan with economic rigor... don't just rely on wishful thinking.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
Don't be disingenuous. There is a real prescriptive aspect to economics, as well as the analytic one. The prescriptive one is the one that treats people as both completely rational and completely instrumental: as both agents and resources, and advocates for political choices based on the optimization of certain statistics. The term "standard of living" is just one of those statistics, since often, in practice, it relies on some standard of gross productivity over lifetime, or gross income.
There's nothing wrong with efficiency, but turning efficiency into an end rather than a means is part of the pathology of the modern.
Often, people are starving because of efficiency: of someone else's, or because of the efficiency of an abstract entity (a "nation", for example) which measures the goal as increasing GDP, rather than making sure that local markets are met. Children are starving because many locales thought it would be more efficient to convert the national economy to goods and crops for export. And, if you conglomerate the income of the wealthy, and the wealth taken by the kleptocratic governments in those countries together, you'd be numerically right. It would be "more".
But economics regulary chooses abstractions as its objects of analysis, knowing that they're wrong (and tweaking the models numerically, like medieval astronomers adding more and more little concentric circles to explain the movement of the planets) but doing it anyway.
How much they save?
700M$ a year estimated.
How much it costs for the action to happen?
Do they loose the good ones instead of bad ones?
There has been more or less common to loose the people you don't want to get rid off because there are layoffs.
Next question is that DO they loose some of their business because of layoffs, by loosing more talented persons willing to jump ship?
Are competitors getting insights by hiring people IBM just lost?
They are risking 9B$ profits by cutting 0.7B$ thats the effect. They cut costs but same time they cut their sales. Now there is risk of loosing more in sales than getting by cutting employees.
Emacs is good operating system, but it has one flaw: Its text editor could be better.
At one time not so long ago companies took pride in not laying off people. The boast was that X company hasn't laid off a single work in so many decades.
Management tried not to layoff people as much as possible because laying off people was seen as a shameful thing to do - an admission of failure on the part of the management to run the company profitably.
To avoid this loss of face, companies resorted to cutting management pay, selling assets and so on. The moment a company announced a layoff, it would appear all over the papers - the market will see it as a sign that the company is down in the dumps.. analysts would rate the company down.
But now the situation has completely reversed. When a company announces huge layoffs, analysts actually rate the company higher. Also, the management will now gloat about how they have "streamlined" operations.. cut of the extra "fat".. become "lean and mean".. etc.. The implication is always that the layoffs were a smart thing to do.
There is no shame anymore..no accountability on the part of the management. The fact that thousands just lost their jobs because the business strategies framed by the suits came up a cropper does not seem to fill the management with a sense of shame or remorse. Fact is, after a round of layoffs, the executives might even give themselves a pay hike!! They will also announce proudly about how they have "increased" their profitability and worked on the "bottomline".
It is quite sad. There is very little honour anymore.
Profit per head is not the only measure of efficiency, you know?
Yes, it is one. But it is applied way too easily by managers whose salaries depend on short-term profit instead of long-term viability.
For one, your headcount depends a lot on the business you are in. Two, headcount doesn't scale linear with company size. You have overhead, you have automation and many other factors. Two people might dig a hole in half the time, but 50 people don't take 1/50th, they'll likely take forever. Likewise, 4 people can build something in a day that one person alone could not ever build.
And let's not even get into the questions of the kind of people you employ. There's a huge difference between having a few highly paid specialists and having a large workforce of minimum-wage slaves. Especially when it comes to efficiency per head.
So in summary, 9 div 300000 does not even begin to compare to 1.73 div x-thousand because there are a lot of other factors in that equation that you can not ignore - unless you're driving an agenda.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
ship my job offshore, I'll find something else to do.
Executive pay is increased when things are good, but only rarely is it decreased, and senior executives are rarely held accountable for mistakes.
The example of Carly at HP has already been given, and airline executives are still making big bucks even as their companies are flirting with (or are already in) bankruptcy.
I don't know that caps are the best idea, but some concrete level of accountability would be nice. If a CEO screws up and costs the company millions of billions of dollars, they should have to pay a real price, not a purely symbolic one.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Cutting the fat is seen as acceptable because people assume that there is fat. That is accually a mangement failure too. It seems to indicate that there are a large number of people in the company that arn't doing their fair share of the work. This is probably true in a lot of these companies, but that accually stems from bad managment. If managment was accually keeping tabs on what everyone was doing they would know who just shows up and surfs /. all day instead of being productive. That situation would either be corrected or the person would be let go. Having people who were useful 10 years ago just sit around and surf is a bad idea for profitibility.