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Friday, 07 April 2006 |
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That’s Not Enough for Some CEOs. They Want to Kill Your Retirement Security, Too. CEOs continued to undermine working families’ retirement security last year, but they took good care of their own nest eggs. Samuel Palmisano, for one, kicked off a plan to freeze the pensions of IBM’s 329,000 employees by 2008—while racking up a guaranteed retirement package worth $4 million annually and total 2005 compensation of nearly $24 million.
Today, the AFL-CIO released its 2006 Executive PayWatch website featuring case studies of out-of-this-world CEO retirement packages and all-new data on CEO compensation packages. Since the first annual PayWatch site was released in 1997, more than 22 million persons have used the website to track data on CEO pay and the corporate abuses that cause it to soar.
This year’s PayWatch site also enables users to contact the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to urge adoption of new disclosure rules for executive pay packages.
The CEO with the most outrageous retirement package is Henry McKinnell, CEO of pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, who leads the Business Roundtable—a major backer of efforts to privatize Social Security. With a $6.5 million annual retirement deal, he sure won’t miss Social Security if it’s gone.
Other kings of the top hat retirement circuit include Exxon Mobile’s Lee Raymond ($6.5 million), AT&T’s Edward Whitacre Jr. ($5.5 million), UnitedHealth Group’s William McGuire ($5.1 million) and The Home Depot’s Robert Nardelli ($3.9 million).
“When it comes to a job and retirement security, there is a double standard and workers are not the ones coming out on top,” said AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka. “Corporate CEOs have been able to rig the rules of the game in their favor and leave workers and their families on the sidelines.”
In 2005, the average CEO of a Standard & Poor’s 500 company received $11.75 million in total compensation, a 3.66 percent increase from 2004. As PayWatch points out, there’s little if any connection between CEO pay and CEO performance. McKinnell, for example, has presided over a nearly 45 percent drop in Pfizer’s stock price over the past six years.
PayWatch’s database of 1,500 CEO pay low-downs is searchable by company name, ticker symbol, industry or total compensation. Here’s a fun feature: Compare your pay to the CEO’s and find out how many hundreds of years it would take you to make that much. Or find out how many thousands of workers could get health or retirement coverage for what the company pays your favorite CEO each year.
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