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This seems like a good idea until they get \"exposed\" using a car service or getting meals for free in the caf or whatever. Then it's bad press.
This seems like a good idea until they get \"exposed\" using a car service or getting meals for free in the caf or whatever. Then it's bad press.
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A $1 salary doth not a Steve Jobs make.
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@doodaddy: The FTC, iirc, also did an investigation that cleared him of wrongdoing.
Further, the attitude has to be right. These guys are doing it out of desperation to get a handout. Apple wasn't getting any handouts, Steve Jobs was just emotionally and fiscally invested in the company. In all reality, his paycheck at that time wouldn't have broke Apple's bank, but it did allow them to tighten the belt a bit.
If you want to pick on anything, how about that he was gifted a Gulfstream Jet for his \"sacrifice\" for the company. It was well deserved just the same, though. If someone told me in 1996 that Apple would be ruling multiple industries and have people running in others ten years later, I would've laughed at them before weeping all over my Performa.
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@Xerloq: You also need black jeans and white sneakers. But then people will think you're trying to be Seinfeld.
@The Name's Ash78, Housewares: If you're going to make fun of Steve Jobs, do it right: it's blue jeans and a black mock turtleneck.
Remember, bonuses are not part of a regular salary.
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@minsky: My thoughts exactly. Look at this way.... Last year, Ford's CEO made $2M in salary with a total compensation of $21.7M. GM's CEO made $1.6M in salary with a total compensation of $14.4M. Chrysler doesn't even disclose CEO pay.
I'm sure they'll manage to scrape by on that $1 annual salary.
$1 salary...how much in bonuses?
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For the umpteenth time it's NOT A BAILOUT - IT'S A LOAN!
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@Triterion: the assumption is that if the automaker(s) entered chapter 11, the federal government would be a creditor & would receive payment from liquidation of assets.
one thing about the federal government - they always get paid.
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@mac-phisto: Fine... I'm in debt to my ears, cause I didn't listen to anything anyone with a half brain's worth of sense said to me since the Carter Administration, and have enough cash to last until next Christmas, but nothing after that. Can I have a loan, too?
@lightaugust: if you're responsible for a million jobs, sure thing.
i understand being pissed off about this, but consider this: it's not entirely their fault. automakers around the world are having problems right now - even the almighty toyota is in a world of hurt. here's some cold hard facts --> [www.bloomberg.com]
let me ask you this: exactly what benefit comes from losing american auto manufacturing? don't the potential local, state & federal property, payroll & income tax dollars ALONE reaped from the largest manufacturing sector in america warrant a short-term investment to keep it going?
@mac-phisto: I actually agree that the 25 bil or whatever is such a small amount compared to the 700 bil we just handed over to the Paulson and Bernake Comedy Duo that I think it IS worth it. And I'm all for the auto bailout, in reality. Heck, I actually think the symbolic damage alone that losing GM would do to a generation of Americans who grew up believing that \"what's good for GM is good for America\" might make it worth a good 10 bil.
My problem is this bullshit semantic wrestling that constantly goes on... It's so clear that the moneyed class doesn't get the damn problem, but still would rather couch it in terms that constantly make it sound better. Whether it's this stupid \"I'll take a dollar salary\" bullshit or \"Lookit me! I'm only flying first class!\" or \"Retention bonuses\" or \"it's a loan not a bailout,\" so we're cool, right?
Folks need to realize that the cards have been called, and that we don't fall prey to spin and pr as easily, so please, call this what it is.
@lightaugust: agreed. the jets & the $1 salary were symbols of excessiveness & greed, but instead of being a sideshow, they became center ring. \"lookee here, folks! pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!\"
i want to see the actual details of their plan (which were supposed to be released today) - where are they? \"we're going to pay our CEO $1, sell our jets/offload leases & magically increase our sales to incredibly unrealistic numbers somehow.\" ??? i don't see anything comprehensive or sustainable in this plan, & that disappoints me.
i'm beginning to think that we have a shitload of executives out there that really have no freaking clue how to do their job in the slightest. & so, as you pointed out, they spend their time crafting clever ways to pretty much steal money however & whenever possible.
@TheSpatulaOfLove: It's not a loan if it is given out knowing the company cannot pay it back. The correct term for this would be federal grant. Now if we let them declare bankruptcy first and which allows them to cut off the control of union labor and restore the ability to fire unneeded workers, we could probably give them a loan they could pay back. But giving them a loan now means we will have to give them unlimited loans forever to prevent bankruptcy or lose all the money we give them when they are forced to declare bankruptcy next year.
um yeah... sure... a loan...
its the type of loan no bank would come within 1,000,000,000 feet of. a high risk, no plan, competitors crushing the company, \"not a bailout\" loan.
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@youbastid: Chrystler paid there loan back, tax payers made money.
Still, I think they're better off in bankruptcy. Let them rework their labor contracts and send the unions packing.
@HIV 2 Elway Resurrected: Yeah, this is all the fault of the auto worker making $20 an hour.
Who screwed up all of the Credit Markets - the guys making $50,000 an hour on Wall Street.
I'd rather save the auto jobs right now - and get rid of the bankers and traders.
@pal003: If they were making $20/hr, it wouldn't be a problem.
As it is, thanks to the union there are janitors making $78/hr. For sweeping floors.
Yeah, I can see where this doesn't lead to a solvent company...
These guys' companies were failing long before the current financial crisis.
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All of their executives should be taking pay cuts. If they aren't willing to lower their salaries to help the company, get new (cheaper) blood in. The people getting paid millions of dollars obviously aren't doing what needs to get done. It's time for new minds to work on the same old problems.
$1. Whoooppie Dooo.
How much in bonus, how much in stock options, how much in loans that will be totally forgiven, how much in free corporate jet use, how much in hunting/ski/whatever junkets?
Corporate Fat Cats are Fat.
Big freakin' whoopdeedoo! Those assholes can easily afford to work for $1/yr. They'll still get plenty of bonuses or whatever euphemistic bullshit term they come up with that equals the word 'bonus.'
The better solution is to get rid of them and start over, at least that would be a move in the right direction.
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Sure you can have your retention fees, but if and only if each agrees, in 24 foot letters (or however large the font is) to put, in proper font, \"FAIL\" on each of their skyscrapers, right under the company logo.
On another note, should the Renaissance Center in Detroit (home to GM) now be renamed the Reformation Center?
I half expected to see Duke's hand connected to that dollar.
Shake it, baby.
Yeah, the'll find a way to still get paid their millions - just look at what AIG is doing!
I know car makers employ a lot of people and we would not like to see everyone of those loose their jobs, but honestly, can they just be allowed to mismanage their companies like that and get help with taxpayer money. Where is the punishment that any other business owner would need to take? Are these multi-million dollar business execs above the law? or above the common sense that rules most everything else? What are the moral standards of these people?
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At the very least can anyone convince the gov't to require the same salary from the financial idiots who head banks up in the bailout???
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For $1 a week, I wouldn't.
For $1 a week and the requirement that the CEO's company car be an '82 Chevette, a '74 Pinto, or an '85 Dodge Omni respectively, I would.
Call me when they disclose all their compensation in light of their salary. This is just more dishonest slight of hand.
A $1 salary last year would have left the poor Ford CEO struggling to get by on $19,500,000.00 compensation for the year.
Oh...The sacrifices these noble men are willing to make for us!
I am humbled.
@Kekaha: Hear hear! Salary is practically negligible for these guys. Why these token, bogus gestures make any news is beyond me.
\"We run our companies into the ground with awful decisions [insert 'CO2 warming is bogus' and 'now we've gotta make cars for hippies' comments from Mr. Lutz] but it's really the unions' fault! We need a bailout!\"
Let 'em die like the dinosaurs they are.
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@TheName: Its about 50% the unions fault. Do you know how much money they dump into Legacy costs alone because everyone gets a big fat pension - they can't fire ANYONE - and everyone makes $50+ an hour. $125 BILLION DOLLARS last year for GM alone - before buying any steel, wire, anything to make cars, they paid PEOPLE $125 BILLION DOLLARS.
Because of the Unions.
@Oranges w/ Cheese: Because of poor management. They fought and fought to prevent government 'socialization' of benefits like health care and pensions. The automakers said they would take care of it, that it was preferable to getting on the slippery slope to nationalized benefits. The automakers stepped into it, and didn't have the foresight to see a few obvious things. They chose this way.
can we reenact the burning of atlanta except with all these companies' headquarters? seriously, let's do it the french way. or the thai way. OR THE SOME OTHER WAY THAT ACTUALLY GETS SOMETHING DONE.
Re-write that as $0 in COMPENSATION and a statutory (i.e. with criminal penalties if not met) obligation to remit to the US Taxpayers an ammount equal to the sum of:
1. The paper-value gains in existing stock held in the company
2. All dividends disbursed in existing stock held in the company
3. The difference between the strike price and the price at the end of the year of all options granted until the bailout loans are repaid.
Said amount to be remitted yearly or whenever the big-3 piss me off.
Mitt Romney, of all people, wrote a great column a few weeks back about how any bailout ought to be conducted: fire all the executives, sell the status symbols, and appoint a gov't receiver to renegotiate every contract from the UAW down to the smallest parts supplier, with the goal of putting the companies back in private hands within a decade.
I didn't like Mittens much during the campaign season, but if he wants to come take over and fix this shit, I'll gladly change my mind. If he can do what his daddy did, well, \"The Man Who Saved Detroit\" could be governor for life if he wanted. He's not doing anything now, right?
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@CumaeanSibyl: Exactly what they need to do! Clean house of all the execs who don't know the difference between running a car company versus continuously flushing huge wads of $10,000 bills down the toilet, and renegotiate those UAW contracts which are helping GM et al to lose some $2k per car they sell.
That, or let them file Chapter 11 and do it themselves.
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@CumaeanSibyl: Where Mittens may not be a good politician, he's a fine businessman, as exampled by the amount of money he has socked away.
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I wish they would do something about lying dealerships and the scams they pull on customers.
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Back to the Dollar a Year Man of the 40's! If they want that solid gold toilet seat now they'll either have to start saving up their salaries or dig into their prior parachute funds.
This is the most unfortunate thing that could've happened.
First, this $1 salary is suddenly a major point in a bailout. Why exactly is it? It is absolutely irrelevant to financial troubles companies are experiencing and has nothing to do (should have nothing to do) with the decision congress makes.
Second, CEOs compensation should be tied up to the profit of the company. With a $1 salary, they will have a major incentive to hide their benefits. The most important goal of CEOs - make shareholders richer - won't be in any way connected to their comp. So they won't do it.
Why don't we drop this $1 bull***t and start talking about the real things in this possible bailout?
interesting commentary on npr this morning indicated that ford may not need the bailout money, but that at least one foreign automaker might qualify for assistance under the plan. any ideas on which automaker that is? daimler maybe?
note that this is not just happening in the US - EU automakers & chinese automakers are also in line:
[www.iht.com]
[www.bloomberg.com]
korean & japanese automakers have cut production significantly, but there's no indication of government assistance (yet). it's quite possible that they are waiting for the outcome of these hearings before they make a decision.
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@mac-phisto: I'd guess Toyota or Honda based on the total number of vehicles they build in the US, or Subaru based on the percentage of vehicles sold in the US that they build in the US.
Maybe they could pledge to make cars the American public actually wants instead?
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All of those dealership financing commercials have just come back to bite them in the ass. Sweet, syrupy justice.
Mittens (I love that) promised Detroit that if he were elected he would do away with CAFE standards and there would be jobs for everyone.
Well, he lost and now he rails in the papers about how they should be allowed to fail.
Mittens is a sore loser.
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I don't give a shit what they pay the management. If you run a profitable business and make desirable cars, you can pay them a billion dollars if you make 2 billion.
Lay me out a roadmap to have every american car get 30+ mpg in 2 years and you can have my tax dollars. Till then, fuck off and die.
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How will they pay for their personal airplanes?!?!
Forget what these clowns make annually! It is chump change compared the money spent on active and retired union workers. I can't believe they are getting a free pass on this one. You want to be competitive in a global economy? Good bye to $100k per year salaries for non-skilled workers. Cut legacy pension funds. How many people of my generation (Gen X) are going to receive cushy pensions with full medical coverage?
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They will take their $1 salary and then sue the companies for millions at the end of the year for only paying them $1.
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Take this with a grain of salt, but the Detroit News suggests that at least for one of the CEOs, compensation may actually be reported accurately:
CEO Rick Wagoner will take a $1 salary next year, and GM is cutting the top four senior executives will see their cash compensation slashed 50 percent in 2009. Neither Wagoner nor top executives will receive bonuses this year or in 2009.
Wagoner already has seen his compensation cut in recent years and has not gotten a bonus in three of the last four years.
Wagoner had a $1.65 million salary in 2007 and has a $2.2 million salary this year. He took a 50 percent cut in pay in 2006, and his total compensation has been reduced sharply since he took the helm of GM in 2000.
Of course that could always change, and maybe there's something that is neither \"salary\" nor \"bonus\", but maybe GM is finally catching on ...
Screw the bail out, give the car manufacturers some breathing room with Cafe standards. 50 states with 50 different requirements for emissions can easily kill a car company.
Need some proof? Look at the U.S. based auto companies, in the U.S. and the U.S. based auto companies in other countries. They're thriving outside our country because they don't have the contrived laws that they have here.
@Craysh: re: the success of Ford and GM in other markets... well, your comments are applicable to the inroads they're making in China. However, Ford and GM are also very successful in Europe, and EC regulations on cars are every bit as strict as US regulations, they just differ (often just because the other market's regulations were \"not invented here\" but that's another issue.)
One reason that Ford and GM are making money in Europe is that Europeans are willing to pay money for small cars. Americans equate small with cheap and typically ignore well-equipped pricier small cars in droves. As an example, the Saturn Astra is a version of the rather successful Opel Astra, but all Americans see is that there are cars about the same size that are available for $4k less, not that the Astra is a nicer, better-equipped car than some of the size- and price-competitive cars to which people are comparing it.
@Craysh: In recent years nearly all models are 50-state legal, i.e. they design for the most stringent (read: CARB) regulations. CAFE and emissions aren't the same thing, though obviously cars that burn more of the same fuel create more total emissions. There have only been a few models recently that were non-CARB states only, and those were mostly diesels.
The bigger bureaucratic disaster with respect to individual states and automobiles is the silly number of fuel formulations that have to be produced to supply the entire country through the year. Some places have 2 or 3 different formulas (for different seasons) and some have fairly arbitrary required components or mixtures, which contributes to seasonal price fluctuations in the price at the pump.
To be honest, GM and Ford were making good progress toward digging their asses out of the hole before the credit market dried up and really screwed up the economy as a whole. Car companies admitted (albeit belatedly) that the SUV wasn't the most efficient way for a lone individual to commute to a white-collar job via paved roads, and they have some decent product in the pipeline.
Ford is working on bringing some of their excellent European offerings here (Fiesta first, then eventually replacing the hideous lump sold under the Focus name in the US with the much more interesting European version in a few years when it's time to cycle that model line.) Ford's 2009 Fusion Hybrid gets better mileage than a Camry Hybrid and has actually become tolerable to look at, and the Escape Hybrid that Mulally will reportedly drive to the next begging session before Congress has been a very popular vehicle.
GM made some interesting choices in offering less-inefficient large vehicles (hybrid Tahoes and Escalades, for example) and a reasonably efficient overall line. They're working on a breakthrough green-halo vehicle with the Volt, though that's proving to be rather slow to market. They had also worked out deals to get out from under some of the worst of the retiree healthcare costs by transferring that responsibility to the UAW in 2010 (along with a pile of cash of course.)
What threw them off the rails was the drying up of readily available credit. It makes it harder for companies to do business, and much harder for credit-addicted Americans to buy anything. Most Americans can't fathom the concept of even paying off a car they buy on credit before they buy a new one, much less the radical idea of actually saving up enough money to buy the whole car outright. When credit got tight they stopped buying (from Toyota and Honda as well as from GM and Ford.)
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Fire the CEO's and all of upper management, deny the bailout. That is all.
While I used to be fond of GM and Ford, I could care less now. Let them and their unions die. Lots of car companies have passed away throughout history. Let these idiots join them. $1 salary, who are you kidding, seriously???
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@CumaeanSibyl: My parents were very much for Mitt because of his financial know how, and if McCain had Mitt as his VP instead of Palin, I'd have voted for him too.
He's completely on the mark on what should be done, get rid of the idiots first and foremost before just giving out money.
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that's what their paycheck was suppose to be a long time ago.... 1 dollars.
Am I the only one that can't get past the grammar errors in the title? For God's sake, an apostrophe makes a term possessive, not plural.
I guess it'll make doing their taxes a lot easier...
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make it a permanent thing and retoractive to when the company was founded, and send that difference to every person in the US, then maybe I'd think about a bailout.
NOT!!
let Ford,GM,Chrysler fail and a better way will arise from the ashes.
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What the crap... Im so sick of these pricks thinking they deserve money. i mean really what have THEY done for the economy other than make overpriced aluminum cars while being in bed with the oil companies and doung virtually nothing on the fuel efficiency front for the people (long sentence). I mean really these guys must have some balls of steel. I swear this country is so damn backwards. Rewarding the most corrupt. Let the bit*hes go bankrupt im sure it wont hurt me a bit. They havent helped me. How can they all of a sudden hurt me so badly. This country blows now. Gives a while new meaning to the rich getting richer.
I'm all for the taxpayer to give them cash. We just collateralize all of their assets, loan them $0.50 on the dollar, and if they don't pay back by a certain date, we liquidate. That bailout line would shrink so fast, the companies would go back to the correct channels, Chapter 11, loans from banks, etc.
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They'll STILL be making more than me.
off topic a little daughter is walmart employee told yesterday 'profit sharing' bonus not being given going back into store i wonder if all ceos are doing without
This proves how stupid the auto company CEOs are. Why would anyone work for only $1.00 per year? No way. No how.
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I'd love a 1 dollar salary if all those stocks and options I had shot up in value after news of a bailout came in.
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yeah, and AIG said they wouldn't give executive bonuses this year.
maybe they should try bringing back the electric car?
it would be a hot commodity in my community
It's absolutely normal practice in many small businesses for an owner or manager to not take a salary or simply not cash your paycheck until all of your employees have been paid. I know dozens of small business owners who are struggling far more than any of their employees due to the fact that they haven't taken a paycheck in months. It's often a necessary evil in the fight to make one's business solvent. If these CEOs would have had the foresight to realize that 20 million dollars is not a reasonable salary years ago, perhaps they wouldn't be in the mess that they're in right now. Also, please note that when Congress inquired if the CEOs would be willing to take a $1 salary the first time they were in D.C. they declined saying that they thought they were fine where they were. So stop it. You're not a martyr big 3 CEOs. Meanwhile, the union employees have higher wages, better healthcare and better pensions than most Americans. Often they are not skilled workers who are getting paid $100k to simply attach a widget to a piece of crap car. So why should our money go to further help them?
The small businesses who have been managing their money to the cent forever will prevail. God willing.
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Sure, but then they'll each get a million bucks -- but it'll be called a \"Financial Resource Distribution Package\" instead of a \"salary\".
@summerbee: Exactly, they \"won't get salaries\" the same way that AIG execs \"won't get bonuses.\"
Salary: $1
Stock Options: $1,322,350
\"Retention\" bonus: $4,405,000
Pretending to make nothing while actually making a killing: PRICELESS.