In February it was announced that General Motors CEO Mary Barra could earn up to $14.4 million this year if the company meets certain goals it had put in place. The pay package is part of a revised employee compensation plan which will reward employees based on the company’s earnings, global market share and overall quality.
Company president Dan Amman, who assumed his position on January 15, the same day Mary Barra was appointed CEO, is getting a raise to $6.8 million this year. This represents an increase of about 29% over the $5.3 million he earned in his former position of chief financial officer.
Shareholders will vote on the new compensation plan at its annual stockholders meeting on June 10 at the Renaissance Center in Detroit. Directors may opt to refuse to follow shareholders’ recommendations on executive compensation.
Due to the fact that the compensation plan is based on individual employee performance and GM’s overall financial performance for the year, the amount executives will receive could be lower or higher than projected amounts.
Comments
Hey Mary. I pay taxes here in the USA. Don’t you owe me?
That money could’ve been much better spent – like on keeping Holden manufacturing operations going for a bit longer!
You can piss and moan all you like but you have to pay for top players no matter if it is Rugby, NFL or a large Corporation.
In the big picture $14 million would hardly pay the utilities at Holden for a year.
The going rate for most larger MFG are $10-15 million on average. No one that is qualified is going to take the lead of GM for $500,000 a year.
Let her do her job for a year and then we decide if she is worth the price. At this point she has not been in long and has handled some very difficult situations well or as well as could be expected.
If she can maintain GM’s profitability and continue to develop new products while dealing with the other issues then she has earned her keep.
Anyone can get one of these jobs If they go to school, get the grades, put in the 7 day 15 hour days, move around a lot, eat a lot of stress, miss their kids growing up and maybe a marriage or two. Yes you can get one of these jobs too.
If it were easy we all would be in the running here.
Until the 1980s, corporate CEOs were paid, on average, 30 times what their typical worker was paid. Since then, CEO pay has skyrocketed to 280 times the pay of a typical worker; in big companies, to 354 times. (Robert Reich)
Meanwhile, over the same thirty-year time span the median American worker has seen no pay increase at all, adjusted for inflation. Even though the pay of male workers continues to outpace that of females, the typical male worker between the ages of 25 and 44 peaked in 1973 and has been dropping ever since. Since 2000, wages of the median male worker across all age brackets has dropped 10 percent, after inflation.
This growing divergence between CEO pay and that of the typical American worker isn’t just wildly unfair. It’s also bad for the economy. It means most workers these days lack the purchasing power to buy what the economy is capable of producing — contributing to the slowest recovery on record. Meanwhile, CEOs and other top executives use their fortunes to fuel speculative booms followed by busts.
Anyone who believes CEOs deserve this astronomical pay hasn’t been paying attention. The entire stock market has risen to record highs. Most CEOs have done little more than ride the wave.
The proposed legislation, SB 1372, sets corporate taxes according to the ratio of CEO pay to the pay of the company’s typical worker. Corporations with low pay ratios get a tax break.Those with high ratios get a tax increase.
For example, if the CEO makes 100 times the median worker in the company, the company’s tax rate drops from the current 8.8 percent down to 8 percent. If the CEO makes 25 times the pay of the typical worker, the tax rate goes down to 7 percent.
On the other hand, corporations with big disparities face higher taxes. If the CEO makes 200 times the typical employee, the tax rate goes to 9.5 percent; 400 times, to 13 percent
Sport figures even the best back in the 60’s had to work two jobs as they made so little in sports too. But supply and demand comes in as there are not many people who can do these jobs and there is more call for good leadership than we have people.
This is also part of the reason we see so many fail at the job as many take risk on people in hopes they will be good leaders and they fail just like a quarterback at Cleveland.
Sorry but this is a capitalism business system in this country where everything works on supply and demand.
The truth is we can pay where the demands are and some do better than other fair or not or we can do a set wage where there Is no incentives and very one suffers the same similar state of misery.
To quote Winston Churchhill.
“The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings: the inherent vice of Socialism is the equal sharing of misery”.
In this world everyone wants to be a Millionaire but the fact is it takes us all. It is not a perfect system but many of the poor in this country are even better off than many of the higher classes in others. We have poor here that own cars, cell phones and big screen TV’s.
This system with it’s faults still provides greater opportunity but so many just leave it there doing nothing with it.
If you want CEO money go out and do what it takes. They are not royalty and many came from common backgrounds like Mary.
Envy is our greatest issue in this country vs. the will to work to improve. Too many expect it all to be handed over. In the big picture you could slice up the $14M among all the GM employees and it would amount to very little.