Posted on 09/25/2011 4:17:55 PM PDT by AfricanChristian
Black & Decker is a household name across the US, as in the UK – as the maker of home and garden improvement products such as the power drill. The company made $8.4bn in sales in 2010 in the US, with net earnings of $198m.
The 101-year-old Maryland-based company has also recently risen in the Fortune standings of top businesses from number 543 to number 288. For this stellar performance, John Lundgren, the CEO, was paid $32.6m last year, a 253% raise over the previous year.
In short, this looks like a solidly successful business that might seem worth emulating in the national search for ideas on how to overcome the economic recession and beat unemployment. Yet – as the latest jobs numbers show no net growth and unemployment stubbornly stuck at 9.1% – the opposite seems to be true.
Not all Lundgren's employees were quite as well rewarded as he was – some 4,000 of the 38,000 Black & Decker worldwide workforce were projected to lose their jobs. Nor did his company give much back to the public – instead, Black & Decker collected $75m in tax refunds from the government in 2010.
Lundgren is one of ten CEOs profiled in of "Executive Excess 2011: The Massive CEO Rewards for Tax Dodging", an annual report published by the Institute for Policy Studies. "Guns don't kill people, the old saw goes. People do," write the authors Sarah Anderson, Chuck Collins, Scott Klinger and Sam Pizzigati. "By the same token, corporations don't dodge taxes. People do. The people who run corporations."
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
I think enforcing the Clayton Act, and getting rid of interlocking directorates would go a long way towards solving some of these problems.
I was hired to work 37.5 hours a week, not 50. If I work 10 extra hours a week, someone is reaping the profit from that. You can’t switch jobs because no one will hire a IT person that is over 55.
Corp execs know when they have you facing an unemployment nightmare -- and yank you around by the short hairs.
That is the reward folks get for loyalty to their employer.
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