It seems like every time you turn around, there’s a new story about a corporate pay scandal. After the Enron, WorldCom, and other recent corporate debacles, we’ve become much more sensitive to the disparity between a corporation’s upper echelon and its workers, and the outrageousness of some pay schemes which appear only to reward mismanagement on a grand scale.
The bad news: it’s still happening out there. CEO and corporate officers are still receiving bloated salaries, bonuses, and stock options, while rank-and-file employees endure layoffs, wage concessions, and pension cutbacks. Almost every day, there’s a new story about a CEO receiving tens of millions of dollars while running the company into the ground, or about the bonuses approved for all the top corporate officers, while the rest of the company’s employees are denied even a cost-of living increase.
The good news: all this increased scrutiny of corporate pay practices means that some reporters now spend their days poring over proxy statements and corporate press releases to bring to the public all the gory details of corporate compensation. Each day, with the release of required SEC public filings, we learn more and more about what corporations are doing to take care of their highest-level employees, even though the days of “nobody’s looking” are starting to ebb.
Even more good news: now all of these articles will be compiled here, at the Workplace Fairness web site, on our site’s new “Corporate Pay Watch” page. Each day, when new articles on how corporate officers are being compensated are released, we will add them to our site. Where possible, we will include details about the pay scheme which will remain on our site, even after the news article being cited is no longer available online, so that over time, our site will present a comprehensive picture of what’s happening in corporate America: what companies are scaling back their executives’ compensation to represent economic reality, and what companies still would rather distribute their wealth to a few top officers, while disregarding the needs of their other employees.
This new feature is part of our site’s “News and Issues” section, our site’s most topical material, which is updated all day long to provide you with the most current information available that affects the workplace. We plan to add even more new features to this area soon, so stay tuned for future additions, and let us know via e-mail what additional features you would like to see that’s not already included.
