In The News
Online helps jobless while keeping an eye on CEOs
In early April, the AFL-CIO and Working America launched an online Unemployment LifeLine campaign to give America’s unemployed workers more resources.
“To stay afloat, people who are out of work need a lifeline to keep them connected to their communities and economic services,” said AFL-CIO President John Sweeney. “UnemploymentLifeLine.com corrals resources for people when they and their families need them the most.”
A week later came more online insight. In a separate but clearly related event, AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka unveiled the updated launch of PayWatch, with new sections and fresh stories of the worst abuses by CEOs. While it sometimes may seem too facile to tie the nation's troubles to company executives who took advantage of taxpayer bailout money, a stroll through www.paypwatch.org is an eye opener that largely justifies citizen anger.
To preview both websites:
UnemploymentLifeLine.com is an online lifeline — a Yellow Pages meets Wikipedia attitude, the AFL-CIO says —for unemployed workers. On the site, people can enter their ZIP code and see a listing of available resources for workers in their area, such as where to go for unemployment insurance, nutritional assistance, heating subsidies, credit counseling, job training programs and much more.
The AFL-CIO and Working America, the 2.5 million-member community affiliate of the AFL-CIO, created the largest set of data on resources for unemployed workers currently available. In addition, at unemployment offices across the country, Working America canvassers are talking to unemployed workers about the issues that matter to them and getting information into their hands.
“Greedy corporate executives rewrote the rules, stole billions of dollars and left our economy in ruins,” said Karen Nussbaum, executive director of Working America. Every month, more than 600,000 US workers lose their jobs. Today, the government’s conservative statistics indicate about 12.5 million US workers are unemployed.
At PayWatch, you’ll meet to your regret Vikram S. Pandit, CEO of Citigroup Inc. He received more than $38 million in total compensation in 2008, the same year his company took $50 billion in US taxpayer money.
But that’s only the top of the trough for these bottom feeders. Learn about retention bonuses. Golden coffins. Turbo-charged pension plans. Hefty severance packages. Lavish “executive physicals.” These are some of the outrageous CEO pay practices highlighted in the AFL-CIO’s 2009 Executive PayWatch website at www.paywatch.org.
One new section focuses on pay excess at companies that received taxpayer assistance under the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). This may be the worst economic slump in decades, but it was painfully easy to highlights the worst CEO pay practices through case studies and a comprehensive database of new CEO pay figures.
Perhaps most annoying, while American workers have proven resilient and optimistic about bettering their futures, a number of companies receiving taxpayer help turn around and actively lobby against workers’ ability to form unions and bargain collectively for fair pay and benefits.
“Americans are rightly angered by CEOs who haven’t learned their lesson,” said Trumka.
Among the companies whose practices are exposed are SunTrust (it received $4.9 billion from the TARP bailout fund and wants shareholders to approve a mega-grant of $7.7 million in stock options for chairman James Wells); Wal-Mart (WMT), the world’s largest retailer, where 46% of employees’ children are either on Medicaid or uninsured;. Toll Brothers. the nation’s largest luxury home-builder, which benefited from the housing bubble and then moved the goalposts on compensation rules to reward founder Robert Toll, and FedEx Corp., whose chairman, Frederick Smith, receives a generous salary, assurance of severance, perks and a pension while the company employs a double standard for its workers. It classifies drivers as independent contractors so it doesn’t have to provide them with basic benefits, overtime pay, expense reimbursements or the fight to unionize.
These cases and many more draw attention at PayWatch, which also records a devastating change in the gap between the rich and poor. In 1980, CEOs of large U.S. companies made 42 times the wages of the average worker; by 2006 the gap had widened to more than 364 times.