HP CEO Gets $2M Raise Despite Laying Off Thousands

Really, I don't see any reason to compare the two things (layoffs vs raise). My bigger complaint is in the % raise she received. What I would like to know is how many normal employees received an 11% raise to their salaries for their efforts? I get it, she is important to the company, but that 11% raise on an already substantially large salary does nothing to help the wage gap when normal workers (even department managers or directors) only get 2-3% on their much smaller salaries. It causes nothing but anger and resentment towards the "upper management" when people hear about these kind of raises while the other employees don't even get a raise that matches the yearly inflation percentage.
 
wgm3446 said:
So much business hating and ignorance here.
Click to expand...

This. If Whitman's restructuring efforts are having a net positive impact on the outlook of the company, why wouldn't they give her a raise? Isn't it entirely possible that the people who were laid off were dispensable? Turns out, employees don't add value to a company just by being there.
 
Fanattic said:
To be fair you could only pay about 30-35 average full time employees for a year with his raise..... Still stupid as hell though.
Click to expand...

It was likely a performance reward fee. Some executives pay is based on how well the company performs. If she turned the company around from the red, and those divisions were no longer needed, then she deserves the payout.
 
Pure fucking greed plain and simple. I've seen it where I work as well. Top level people paying themselves huge sums while telling the employees "due to economic hardships, we won't be giving raises this year". This coming from a non profit. We found out they reported their earnings of the top level staff. Greedy liars. And they are all on each others board as well. Fucking disgusting.
 
toffty said:
And the rich continue to get richer. Wages for the top 1% account for 45% of all (tax-reported) income per year of all wage earners in the US (this top percentile are those making more than 380k / year). Let's see how much more fail Reaganomics is, the money will fall eventually :rolleyes:

Another perspective, every wage earner in the US could be paid 250k a year and there would still be money left over for wages of over a million USD for the few 'privileged' people.
Click to expand...

There is an inherent assumption there that all wage earners are equal, which is not usually the case ... although we can argue over the value of the extremes of highly compensated employees (Cxx and other executive positions), most workers are paid what the market requires them to be paid (which is how capitalism is supposed to work)

I have generally seen an increase in my salary over the years as my experience and special skills have increased ... if I do not feel that my compensation is suitable then it is up to me to remedy that by requesting more compensation from my current employer (and usually addressing the increased responsibilities that go with that) or to seek a new employer who will compensate me at the level I feel is appropriate (and if I can find no employer willing to compensate me at that level then the estimation of my value and worth might be slightly inflated)

Companies should pay their workers an appropriate wage to suit the company goals ... if you want the best people that money can buy then you will need to offer more money and benefits ... if you want acceptable people you will need less ... if you want any warm body you can find you will need even less and can pay the minimum that the law allows ... those are the basic tenets of capitalism (and despite some people's opinions, that is how wages in the USA are determined for most workers) :cool:
 
Fanattic said:
To be fair you could only pay about 30-35 average full time employees for a year with his raise..... Still stupid as hell though.
Click to expand...

farscapesg1 said:
Really, I don't see any reason to compare the two things (layoffs vs raise). My bigger complaint is in the % raise she received. What I would like to know is how many normal employees received an 11% raise to their salaries for their efforts? I get it, she is important to the company, but that 11% raise on an already substantially large salary does nothing to help the wage gap when normal workers (even department managers or directors) only get 2-3% on their much smaller salaries. It causes nothing but anger and resentment towards the "upper management" when people hear about these kind of raises while the other employees don't even get a raise that matches the yearly inflation percentage.
Click to expand...

Look at it this way, let's say the company was loosing an equivalent of 11% based on net receipts.

Lets say she turned things around and made a 2% in earnings based on net receipts.

Meg Whitman's 11% of that 13% the company actually saved is an incredibly small amount and would do nothing to keep dead weight around for long.

Do you know what the average commission of a salesman is? Sometimes is excess of 50%.
 
TheToE! said:
Pure fucking greed plain and simple. I've seen it where I work as well. Top level people paying themselves huge sums while telling the employees "due to economic hardships, we won't be giving raises this year". This coming from a non profit. We found out they reported their earnings of the top level staff. Greedy liars. And they are all on each others board as well. Fucking disgusting.
Click to expand...

So much this.

"Class Warfare" is not the poor fighting the rich, it's the covert war the rich 1% have been waging against everyone else since the early '80s, bleeding us dry of all our money promising better times in the future.
 
kbrickley said:
There is an inherent assumption there that all wage earners are equal, which is not usually the case ... although we can argue over the value of the extremes of highly compensated employees (Cxx and other executive positions), most workers are paid what the market requires them to be paid (which is how capitalism is supposed to work)

I have generally seen an increase in my salary over the years as my experience and special skills have increased ... if I do not feel that my compensation is suitable then it is up to me to remedy that by requesting more compensation from my current employer (and usually addressing the increased responsibilities that go with that) or to seek a new employer who will compensate me at the level I feel is appropriate (and if I can find no employer willing to compensate me at that level then the estimation of my value and worth might be slightly inflated)

Companies should pay their workers an appropriate wage to suit the company goals ... if you want the best people that money can buy then you will need to offer more money and benefits ... if you want acceptable people you will need less ... if you want any warm body you can find you will need even less and can pay the minimum that the law allows ... those are the basic tenets of capitalism (and despite some people's opinions, that is how wages in the USA are determined for most workers) :cool:
Click to expand...

I agree this is how it should work and it's how it's worked for me personally too. BUT even if it works for us, that doesn't mean that's how it works everywhere. Just going off tax data and plotting that backward it's clear, wages for the lower 90% have not followed this trend and has been either stagnant or has fallen (adjusted for inflation oc).
 
Hornet said:
If the company is doing that bad, then the CEO simply doesn't deserve a raise.
Click to expand...

Meh, just like the Wall Street bail outs, "all in the contract" blah blah blah, bullshit. Glad to see our taxes paid those fucks' bonuses.
 
toffty said:
I agree this is how it should work and it's how it's worked for me personally too. BUT even if it works for us, that doesn't mean that's how it works everywhere. Just going off tax data and plotting that backward it's clear, wages for the lower 90% have not followed this trend and has been either stagnant or has fallen (adjusted for inflation oc).
Click to expand...

It is more an effect of the globalization of the economy ... a half century ago most companies didn't have access to any workers except where they were based or had their main factories ... now, in a global economy and where super specialized skills are not needed, a company can be based anywhere in the world and hire workers worldwide as well ... this has tended to keep worker wages down in higher wage regions (like the USA and EU) while driving them up in lower wage countries (China, Malaysia, etc) due the competition for skilled workers

Most CEOs are vastly overpaid ... on that I will agree with folks ... but not all CEOs are overpaid (if you use the expansion of company value and stock price as a measure of their success or failure) ... regardless of what we think of their abilities, there is a very small population of CEO candidates to choose from, and that tends to have an inflationary effect on their wages (driving them up to attract the most talented members of a very small population of workers) ... that doesn't mean that Boards can't make bad decisions and misjudge the fit of a person or their ability to perform, but generally they pay CEOs a lot of money because they think they are doing a good job (or because they expect a lot of them)

The major issue I have with Cxx pay is their Golden Parachutes ... they shouldn't be allowed to fail and still receive massive compensation to leave ... and if a Board needs to offer someone a Golden Parachute to come on board they should really reevaluate their need of that person and whether another person would do just as well ... near as I can tell, Meg Whitman is a fairly good fit for what HP needs right now and so they are probably right to give her a decent raise ... the CEO of Blackberry or other low performing companies should probably be shown the door
 
kbrickley said:
There is an inherent assumption there that all wage earners are equal, which is not usually the case ... although we can argue over the value of the extremes of highly compensated employees (Cxx and other executive positions), most workers are paid what the market requires them to be paid (which is how capitalism is supposed to work)
Click to expand...
That's only how the middle-class works, and at the extremes of the spectrum what the market dictates often completely divorces contribution from compensation, and that's just wrong.

Is a general more important than a private? Yes. Does a general work harder than a private? Not always. But is it important that a general make more money than a private as an incentive system for underlings to continue to better themselves and move up the ranks? Yes.

But while a general in the army makes far more than a private, we don't see the type of disconnect we see with the leadership of publicly traded companies.

A general in the army after his 20 years of service earns about $180K a year, whereas a private makes around $25K a year starting out. So the general is making as much money as seven privates.

A CEO of a large publicly traded company though often makes 400 times what the average employee that works for him does. And that is just absolutely ridiculous, as that is still just ONE person. But the problem is that the board more or less has the power to award themselves whatever salaries they want, and while in theory they are accountable to the stockholders, they generally only care if the stock is going up or down and one employee, even massively overpaid, isn't going to sink the ship.

Then you have the opposite side of the spectrum where you have unskilled labor busting ass for 80 hours a week in say a chicken factory and barely making enough to put food on the table. And realistically, no matter how hard that chicken factory worker tries, he isn't going to just apply himself more and become a Fortune 500 CEO, as that is something you really have to be born into to be in the right social circles with parents that can afford to send you to the right Ivy League school.

So capitalism is only the least shitty system we have invented, but absolutely it is broken since wealth tends to naturally accumulate wealth (its easier to make money when you have money, and harder to keep money when you are poor). It is fundamentally a flawed system though, but the problem of course is if you just say tax the rich by 90%, you're then again still divorcing contribution from compensation if you're just giving that money out as handouts to people that are lazy useless fucks sitting on their hands all day.
 
Bone_Enterprise said:
How else are you going to dodge taxes?
Click to expand...

Yeah except you don't dodge taxes that way, you pay taxes on any sort of stock options you get as a bonus as if it was cash, and then you pay taxes again (granted less) whenever you cash in those options. And unless Jobs' wife does something very un-Jobs like and leaves it all to a non-profit charity when she dies then it gets taxed again.
 
nutzo said:
I agree with you on computers, but they still make some of the best laser printers.
Click to expand...

Their printers are what I have the biggest beef with. My sister in law was an engineer for printers at the Boise location, after what she told me I'll never buy them.
 
OEM said:
Their printers are what I have the biggest beef with. My sister in law was an engineer for printers at the Boise location, after what she told me I'll never buy them.
Click to expand...

Just about every printer company intentionally cuts corners and cheapens up all solidly designed pre-release versions, then calls them their production/release versions. Almost all big-name business class printers are made in 1 of 2 places today: Latin America (usually Mexico) or Asia (usually China).

The trick is getting a model which is the lesser of the evils, which will vary from brand to brand depending on the categories for volume, use, and features/functions.
 
Yet the only thing I would buy from them is the new Omen 15, even then I feel that its a little over price considering the options out there. I guess HP isnt really competing in the consumer laptop market anymore, and they really dont have a mobile division or for that matter consumer anything anymore as most of their products are pretty garbage. Dell on the other hand has come out with some really nice and solid consumer products since they went private, I would actually buy the new XPS 13 if I was looking for a 13".
 
kbrickley said:
Although there seems to be a strong anti-CEO sentiment in the worker class, some of them are very valuable ... When I worked for Intel the CEOs while I was there (Grove, Barrett) and the one who took over after I left (Otellini) were worth every penny and were deserving of suitable compensation (even when the company went through transitions and layoffs) ... when I was at Flextronics the CEO (Michael Marks) was good for company stock growth and I could see why he was rewarded with suitable compensation increases (even when the company regularly restructured and laid off employees) ... if a company is restructuring a company might need to reduce heads (even though the overall company direction is good) and if the CEO is properly leading the restructuring effort then they should be rewarded for that (as stability in the CEO role, especially if you have a high profile CEO, can be good for the company stock performance and general perception) ... bottom line is that CEOs perform a very specialized role in most companies and unlike an engineer (who can be hired from a broad pool of candidates) there are often few CEOs suitable to lead large companies (and the company must compensate them properly to attract and retain the best candidates)
Click to expand...

There's an 'anti-CEO' sentiment because from 1978 to 2011 the average worker compensation increased by 5.7% while the CEO compensation increased by 726.7%! (from a Washington Post article)
 
Or the fact that worker productivity used to be linked to worker pay; in the '70s, it completely unlinked, with worker productivity continuing to grow at the historical rate but pay going completely stagnant? Basically, CEOs and upper management said screw sharing it, and rolled it all up to themselves.
 
Ducman69 said:
That's only how the middle-class works...
Click to expand...

The middle class is poor and sad because it ties up all its money in a home and cars (and is actually worth negative money since it's swimming in debt) instead of investing it. Honestly though, the middle class is in the middle so when they complain, it's not very reasonable and they really just need to stop so the wealthy don't have to hear it all the time.
 
toffty said:
Everyone should. As the rich become richer and continue to hoard their cash, the less liquid the market becomes. Less liquidity means less spending power for the majority of people - 90% of the US (those making less than 110k / year). Less money in the market causes wages to fall which easily causes a spiral effect of less liquidity, lower wages/lost jobs, etc. This is oc laymens terms but we've been living through lower minimum wages (thanks to inflation) and pay (3% raise a year is breaking even) since the early '80s. This is true for lower the 90%. The top 1 percent have seen their wealth and wages skyrocket - literally exponential growth - while the following 9% have had a stead linear growth of around a few percentage points in growth.
Click to expand...


Fractional reserve banking.
 
toffty said:
And the rich continue to get richer. Wages for the top 1% account for 45% of all (tax-reported) income per year of all wage earners in the US (this top percentile are those making more than 380k / year). Let's see how much more fail Reaganomics is, the money will fall eventually :rolleyes:

Another perspective, every wage earner in the US could be paid 250k a year and there would still be money left over for wages of over a million USD for the few 'privileged' people.
Click to expand...

TYT: "This Wealth Gap Chart Is Absolutely Insane",
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dm-xb-O1Xh8
 
CreepyUncleGoogle said:
I don't see why this is a big deal. Lower tier employees are less skilled and far more expendable.
Click to expand...

This has never been my experience. Often people are promoted to those roles because they can't hack the real work or they know someone important.
 
I don't see the issue, company wasn't doing as well as they wanted. She came in and made a multi year plan to turn company around, one of these plans was to streamline internal workflow of the company and make it more efficient. If she can get the same job done with thousands less employees if say she's doing her job.

If you read the artical it clearly states this is what happened, she made promises to streamline and save money and has been delivering so the board has given her a pay increase. Layoffs were for a logical reason, but as usual most people on this forum think ceo's are always evil and layoffs are never justified lol
 
CreepyUncleGoogle said:
The middle class is poor and sad because it ties up all its money in a home and cars (and is actually worth negative money since it's swimming in debt) instead of investing it. Honestly though, the middle class is in the middle so when they complain, it's not very reasonable and they really just need to stop so the wealthy don't have to hear it all the time.
Click to expand...

Wait, isn't buying a home considered an investment? Oh wait, it used to be before all of the big banks scammed America's housing market, but I'm guessing from your comments that you were ok with that too. How do people who have no money, since they are "swimming in debt" invest? And don't people have to buy cars so they can continue to get to work to barely making ends meet? Since of course there's little investment in any kind of public transportation in the US? Because this "buy cars, build roads, buy oil!" mentality is nothing but a huge profit center for everyone involved?
 
Your premise is that anyone who holds debt is unable to invest?
 
Silly drones, people deserve no more consideration than paperclips, mere resources. Actually, paperclips have greater importance because they're inventoried, budgeted for and, necessary for doing business.
 
mouse-trap.jpg
 
aardvark sandwich said:
Your premise is that anyone who holds debt is unable to invest?
Click to expand...

The average person usually pays greater interest rates on their debt than the return rates they could hope to earn from investments. If you had money it would be better to pay off the debt than to invest it. I suppose you could, it being a free country, still invest if you wanted to. But it would be dumb to take your $20k or whatever and invest it and earn $500 and then pay $758 interest on the $20k in debt that you could have paid off.
 
The sad part for the 15,000 laid off, is that their jobs did not go away. The jobs were simply moved either off the payroll to a third party provider (outsourced) or moved to a cheaper 4th world country. Carly started the process and the next three CEO's simply refined and accelerated the process.
 
Hornet said:
If the company is doing that bad, then the CEO simply doesn't deserve a raise.
Click to expand...

What if I told you that laying off employees isn't always because a company is doing poorly.

In fact companies' stocks are often rewarded when they perform layoffs.
 
Monk0101 said:
The sad part for the 15,000 laid off, is that their jobs did not go away. The jobs were simply moved either off the payroll to a third party provider (outsourced) or moved to a cheaper 4th world country. Carly started the process and the next three CEO's simply refined and accelerated the process.
Click to expand...

Bingo. The largest staff reduction to HP's workforce was here in the US. The jobs got moved to mostly Mexico, with some of those jobs now needing 2-3 people in those countries to replace the 1 person in the US. Happened to me, my wife, and would have probably happened to Monk101 if he had not been lucky enough to retire. ;)
 
Yeah, my favorite was working for a company that constantly sent out emails to everyone bragging about their umpteenth record breaking quarter in a row. I almost missed the email for the layoff meeting in between them all...

Instead of working us 40 a week indefinitely they worked us 60-80 a week with layoffs every other quarter. AKA the new American production setup.
 
timta2 said:
Wait, isn't buying a home considered an investment? Oh wait, it used to be before all of the big banks scammed America's housing market, but I'm guessing from your comments that you were ok with that too. How do people who have no money, since they are "swimming in debt" invest? And don't people have to buy cars so they can continue to get to work to barely making ends meet? Since of course there's little investment in any kind of public transportation in the US? Because this "buy cars, build roads, buy oil!" mentality is nothing but a huge profit center for everyone involved?
Click to expand...

No one forced them to mortgage a home or take out a loan for a car they couldn't afford to buy in cash. That's their fault for putting themselves into a situation where they can't put aside money for savings and investments because they were dumb enough to obtain expenses equal to rather than lower than their income. When I was still all poor and stuff, I still managed to save money by exercising some restraint and stuff and I wasn't even like middle class or anything back then.
 
farscapesg1 said:
Really, I don't see any reason to compare the two things (layoffs vs raise). My bigger complaint is in the % raise she received. What I would like to know is how many normal employees received an 11% raise to their salaries for their efforts? I get it, she is important to the company, but that 11% raise on an already substantially large salary does nothing to help the wage gap when normal workers (even department managers or directors) only get 2-3% on their much smaller salaries. It causes nothing but anger and resentment towards the "upper management" when people hear about these kind of raises while the other employees don't even get a raise that matches the yearly inflation percentage.
Click to expand...

Loss and gain have always been associated in the human experience , just like pain and pleasure.

Picture the following scene in your mind.

A great table, upon it, numerous goblets of wine, platters of fish, foul, pork, and beef. A king and his court sit at the table, indulging on the finest swill that life can offer.

Outside the walls, people watch their wages stagnate, the cost of living constantly increase, employment being moved offsbore, and the economy slowly languishing.

People can understand layoffs, but someone in the company gaining from it just glaringly rubs shit under the people's noses.
 
No surprise, executives take care of each other like they own the world. I've seen it happen over and over. CEO does a horrible job, he leaves the company but takes 30 million in severance or stock. Once you get to that the C level or on a board of directors you can pretty much do anything.
 
Man threads like these always bring out the sociopaths on Hardocp.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top