I’ll be spending the weekend at the Hamilton World of Motorcycles Expo so things will stay static here for a couple of days. And today I’m cheating a little by posting a blog I have up on the 981 Free FM website. The company that’s trying to get many of its workers to take a 50% pay cut posted record profits this week and the local hospital network revealed that it had given a former CEO a $1.17 million dollar lump sum just for staying on the job. Those incidents inspired a blog titled, Just Because You Can… Morals have certainly changed since my parents’ day. Things are more transparent and realistic, in my view.
But morality has not improved or evolved in many aspects of corporate culture. It is, in a word, disgusting.
Someone remarked this week that we can’t blame a hospital CEO for taking a $1.17 million dollar retention payment – yes, a payout for merely staying in his job – because any one of us would take it if it was offered. I disagree. This was a negotiated term of a contract. At some point a person who is in charge of an admittedly “cash-strapped” (at the time) public health organization can put up their hand and say, you know what guys, this is out of control. The person who stands to benefit from the deal can also say, that’s enough. But that didn’t happen.
What Caterpillar has chosen to do at Electro-Motive is also immoral. Out one side of the company’s mouth it is saying that it needs to slash worker wages to stay competitive and out the other side it tells us about its pride in record sales and profits that are measured in billions. I’ll admit that I have never been a big supporter of unions, especially in my own industry. But I can’t see any way of defending what Caterpillar is doing. The company CEO, Douglas Oberhelman, is hiding behind a PR firm that continuously quotes him as saying “no comment” while he personally rakes in $10.5 million this year.
You can say that Oberhelman made his deal and that’s his business. But I’d ask you, just because you can, does that mean you should? We all joke about how we’d behave if we were wealthy. Does this seem like a good example? I’d say it’s one of the worst.