Corporate Crime: The “Golden Parachute”
Who’s to say that we caused the recession? Few of us really had enough money to have not spent it properly, but as for the people who do…
After having trouble with my 3D tutorial series, I was alerted to this issue once again. I remember a few years back I was in the car with my father and he was talking about getting some hardware supplies of some sort. Just then we passed Home Depot. I asked him why we didn’t just get it there and he replied that Home Depot had recently paid their CEO a few hundred million dollars to quit. He was protesting.
I since learned that this is close to what’s called a “golden parachute”, a term that was invented for special benefits that are paid to high-rank executives when they leave. You know it happens all the time if there is actually a phrase for it.
The so often cited paradox is that these people are the ones getting all that money when the people who do the corporation’s work get almost nothing, and are currently being laid off. Some argue that the executives are professionals, and nobody else has the skill to do what a CEO does. Think about it. In theory they run the company. That means everything from what it sells to how they advertise it, and absolutely everything in between. It’s humanly impossible to handle that on the massive scale of most corporations. They delegate most of their work, and when you’re a corporate CEO it’s easy to get carried away with that. Either way, they don’t do much more “work” than I do here on Triond. The similarities are amazing (the sitting around, the typing on the computer, the Wii and PS2 upstairs), yet they earn 1 billion times as much as I do (I get very little readership).
Speaking of which, where do they even get these ungodly sums of money? No single person would need that kind of money to live off of, or even a group of over a thousand people. They could easily shave small bits from their profit margin and give us an easier time, or pay their employees more. Do corporations feel they need this money to give golden parachutes to their CEOs? Or is this some sort of twisted inter-company one-up-man-ship? If they were saving it for the future they most likely wouldn’t be toppling left and right, would they?
And why would you want to pay someone to leave? Agreeing to a golden parachute deal is, as any recession-hit American can tell you, just like saying, “Alright, pretend to work for us a while then screw up on purpose”.
Out of the Fortune 500 companies, how many do you think have golden parachutes? And what do you do about it? You know, I don’t think it would be too hard to get a few buddies together and start your own small-scale corporation with no golden parachute. Don’t you know someone who might actually be able to run a small company (without massive incentives)?
