The 10 Greediest People of 2008

By Sam Pizzigati, Too Much: A Commentary on Excess and Inequality. Posted December 23, 2008.

Thain's bonus request quickly became a public relations disaster. By mid-December, Merrill and Thain, under increasing pressure, would unrequest the bonus millions. The good news for Mr. Fix-It? He still may get a $5.2 million "change-of-control payment" for selling Merrill -- and he still has a job.

Unlike average families who lost everything when Merrill's subprime mortgage securities went sour, Thain still has a house, too. A nice one, a 14-bedroom palace north of Manhattan complete with tennis courts, swimming pools, and a fish-filled private lake.

1: Richard Gilman

The CEO of a small factory on Chicago's North Side, by Fortune 500 standards, rates as distinctly small-time. But this particular CEO, Richard Gilman, helped make headlines -- and history -- in 2008. He fully deserves this year's premier place in America's top ten greediest.

Gilman started running Republic Windows and Doors, a modest, four-decade-old plant, in 2006. Layoffs soon followed, and, eventually, only about 240 workers remained from a unionized labor force once over 500 strong.

Those workers, earlier this fall, realized something even more ominous was coming at them. Equipment at the Chicago plant had started vanishing. What the workers didn't know: Republic's "deciders" had set up a new company and bought a nonunion window and door plant in Iowa.

Two days into December, Republic gave workers the bad news. The plant would shut down three days later. The workers would lose their earned vacation time and their health insurance -- and not see any of the severance legally due them.

Just another typical assault on workers with a precarious foothold in the middle class. Or so things seemed. But the workers then did something extraordinary. Reviving memories of the Great Depression-era "sit-down" strikes, they occupied the plant -- and captured America's imagination.

The sit-down forced Gilman and his money pot, the Bank of America, to the bargaining table where a settlement soon took shape. But Gilman suddenly threw a monkey-wrench into the works -- and gained a slot for himself in this year's top ten greediest.

Gilman demanded that "any new bank loan to help the employees also cover" the lease of his Mercedes and BMW and eight weeks of his $225,000 salary.

The workers would have none of that. Gilman would drop his demand. The bank funding would come through. The workers had won. Greed had lost.

That hasn't much over the last three decades. Maybe the greedy have finally gone too far. We may have reached the end of an era. America's generation-long Great Greed Grab may soon be no more.

See more stories tagged with: economy, ceos, hedge funds, golden parachutes, madoff, thain

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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