It is time that American media begins to report (like good labor unions instead of as Wall Street love children) and get this and other stories out and circulating properly in schools and homes..
KURZARBEIT AND SEATS ON BOARD ARE NEEDED IN AMERICA
Sarah Anderson is Global Economy Project Director at the Institute for Policy Studies. Anderson also noted in her interview with Juan Gonzalez last week that Americans and businessmen & employees need to "look for some ideas at European countries, where they have policies that discourage layoffs by requiring higher severance payments and other things to really promote preserving jobs. They also have a system called--well, in German it's called Kurzarbeit, but it's where the government can help pay for part of a worker's salary with reduced hours, just to be able to keep them on payroll through tough times. And I think there are some experiments with that in some of the US states, as well. Overall, the European countries have tried to avoid the kind of real devastating effects that we've seen in the US and, of course, have stronger social protection and unemployment insurance programs there, as well. So we can learn from other countries. In Europe, also, in about a dozen countries, they require big companies to have representatives of workers on their boards. We think that could really help with the executive pay problems, as well.
Please, America, listen to good stories and circulate them in your emails--instead of all the junk and propaganda that is out their by BIG BUSINESS AND LOBBY INTERESTS against your best interests.
The transcript of the interview, from the Democracy Now web site, is below:
JUAN GONZALEZ: Two years into the recession, there's one small group of Americans who are not feeling the bite of the economic downturn: CEOs. Chief executive pay in 2009 more than doubled the CEO pay average for the decade of the 1990s. It more than quadrupled the CEO pay average for the 1980s and ran approximately eight times the CEO average for all the decades of the mid-twentieth century.
And a new study from the Institute of Policy Studies shows that CEOs who fired the most workers during the recession took home the highest pay. According to that study, the CEOs of the fifty corporations responsible for the biggest layoffs were paid an average $12 million--42 percent more than the average pay for the Standard & Poor's 500. The study covered the period from November 2008 to April of this year. For 72 percent of companies, mass layoffs were announced during periods of profit and high CEO salaries.
For more on this story, I'm joined now from Washington, DC, by the lead author of the report, titled "Executive Excess 2010: CEO Pay and the Great Recession." Sarah Anderson is Global Economy Project Director at the Institute for Policy Studies.
Welcome to Democracy Now!
SARAH ANDERSON: Great to be here, Juan. Thanks.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Sarah, lay out what you found.
SARAH ANDERSON: Yeah. Well, we thought, obviously, since we're in the middle of such a terrible jobs crisis, that it would be a good idea to look at the companies that have cut the most jobs under this crisis, and then look at how the CEOs at those companies were doing. And I guess it wasn't any surprise to us to find that the CEOs at these top job-cutting companies weren't really tightening their own belts. But what was truly outrageous was to find out that they were actually making significantly more than their overpaid peers at other big US companies. And so, to be specific, what we looked at were the fifty companies that have had the most layoffs. All of them have cut more than 3,000 jobs since November 2008. And as you said, on average, they made $12 million last year, which was 42 percent more than S&P 500 CEOs as a whole.
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