A word on CEO's
From the ABC........'nuff said
Sol Trujillo's payout when he leaves Telstra will be 93 million dollars and some of us will ask how he earned it. 93 million dollars would keep ten small theatre companies going for a thousand years on the interest alone. 93 million dollars would fund a month of the Iraq War.
It's a thousand times the annual wage of a New York fireman. It's three hundred times the annual wage of Kevin Rudd. In a bank earning seven percent interest, it would make him 17,835 dollars a day. 743 dollars an hour. 12 dollars a minute. A dollar every five seconds.
It's a lot of money. How did he earn it?
Well, he asked some of his undermanagers to sack thirty thousand Australian workers, disrupting a hundred thousand lives. He raised the cost of owning and using a phone by, oh, about 17 percent. And that's about it, really. 93 million dollars. With interest after fourteen months, it'll be a hundred million dollars.
What CEOs do for their money is something we never ask. The CEO of Sydney Airport makes sure planes land safely, the way they always have. The CEO of London Water makes sure clean water comes out of the tap, the way it always did. The CEO of Qantas makes sure its planes fly safely while sacking more and more of its tired staff.
CEOs sack people. That's pretty much all they do. They don't sack them face to face. That would be too much like hard work. They earn their seven or eight millions a year by asking other people to do the sacking.
And the average CEO has to sack a lot of people to make up for the seven or eight million dollars he's earning. With payouts, that adds up to, oh, 160 loyal employees for a start.
Their distress, relocation and search for another job, their children's interrupted schooling and loss of friends don't trouble him. They are things he doesn't need to hear. He's got his eight million dollars, and that's what matters. If he was offered any less – eight hundred dollars an hour, say, not nine hundred – he wouldn't take the job.
He's called a CEO because if he was called a boss he might sound harsh and sinister. Unions have bosses, corporations have CEOs. They're there to sack people, to improve the bottom line.
Many of them administrate what used to be pretty much government monopolies: British Rail, Sydney Airport, Qantas, ETSA, various ferries, buses, ambulances. These were 'privatised' because it was thought a corporation would run them 'more efficiently' (meaning they'd sack more people) because 'private enterprise' was more 'motivated' to do so.
But a CEO is not motivated at all. If he stuffs up he gets, oh, four, five million dollars to walk away. That's 280 thousand a year, or 355 thousand a year, in interest for the rest of their lives for failing. How can they be said to be motivated to succeed? A government minister, a public servant, is punished when things fail. A CEO is rewarded.
What are CEOs for? They sack telephonists and replace them with machines. They merge companies and sack a lot of duplicated employees. They move Mitsubishi out of South Australia to somewhere cheaper. They make a lot of people miserable and their shareholders richer; shareholders mostly born rich, like them. They don't gratify their customers, they put them in queues.
What are CEOs for? Without them, planes would still land at Mascot. Water would still flow through taps. Mobile phones would still get through to London in thirty seconds.
And a lot more people would be happy, working and settled, not scared every minute they'd soon have to rewrite their lives.
CEOs are actually a revisiting of the Divine Right of Kings. Nobody deserves that much money, that much power over lives. Nobody needs that much money. Sol's payout is a million times as much as a poverty-level African survives on in a year. What made him so kingly, so deserving? Did he ever repair a phone, climb up a telegraph pole?
Teachers are asked to show wage restraint, but not Sol. Nurses are told they ask for too much, but not Sol. Not till now.
Teachers save souls and nurses save lives, but not Sol. He just gets three dollars a second in his retirement for putting up your phone bills, and sacking the men that used to repair the lines, and wrecking your country town.
He's much more deserving than any nurse or teacher. A hundred thousand times more deserving.
Wouldn't you say?