A Serial Job-Killer Is Stalking America

By Sam Pizzigati, Too Much: A Commentary on Excess and Inequality. Posted April 27, 2009.

The euphemism for this job killing: downsizing. Top executives at the 50 U.S. companies that did the most “downsizing” in 2001, researchers from the Institute for Policy Studies and United for a Fair Economy reported in 2003, averaged 44 percent pay increases the next year.

Compensation for those job killers, that study documented, increased over seven times faster than compensation for CEOs overall.

This job-killing profiteering is still going strong. Mark Hurd, the CEO of Hewlett-Packard since 2005, last year cleared $44.4 million in gains from previously awarded stock options and other “incentives” — plus another $21.4 million in new compensation. Over his first 46 months as H-P CEO, Hurd wheeled and dealed his way to 31 mergers. He has so far killed nearly 40,000 jobs.

Larry Ellison, the CEO of business software giant Oracle, has merged and purged his way to a fortune that Forbes last month estimated at $22.5 billion. Ellison pulled off his most brazen bit of job killing back in 2005 when he shelled out $10.6 billion to buy out PeopleSoft, an 11,000-employee rival, then proceeded to put the ax to 5,000 jobs.

Ellison’s latest takeover — last week’s acquisition of Silicon Valley’s Sun Microsystems — will end up eliminating, analysts believe, between 5,500 and 10,000 positions, even more jobs than the PeopleSoft grab. But no members of Congress who’ve been blasting the Employee Free Choice Act have so far made any protest whatsoever against Oracle’s latest job-killing maneuver.

Ellison’s personal fortune, meanwhile, is holding up quite nicely, despite the global financial meltdown. This May 8, notes CNBC, Ellison will pocket a $57.5 million quarterly Oracle stock dividend check. In all, over the next 12 months, he’ll reap $230 million in dividends alone.

Job-killers like Larry Ellison don’t have to worry about sharing any of the enormous wealth their empires are so prolifically generating. They don’t, after all, bargain collectively with their employees — and they don’t want to have to start. If Congress kills the Employee Free Choice Act, they won’t have to.

See more stories tagged with: congress, labor, republicans, unions, inequality, efca, jobs

Sam Pizzigati is the editor of the online weekly Too Much, and an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies.

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