Airline exec gets golden parachute

[UpInArms]

http://www.freep.com/money/business/siegel21_20040421.htm

ARLINGTON, Va. -- US Airways Group Inc.'s former president and chief executive, who stepped down this week because of friction with unions over cost cutting, will collect a multimillion-dollar severance package.

The airline has not disclosed the exact amount of David Siegel's severance, but its annual proxy statement indicates he is entitled to receive a $4.5-million payment and possibly more, within five days. The severance is available even if Siegel left voluntarily, as long as he cited good cause.

Siegel stepped aside Monday, saying he felt obliged to do so in order that the company could implement cost cuts necessary to avoid a second trip into bankruptcy. Many of those cuts would have required employees to submit to another round of substantial pay cuts, and union leaders' relationship with Siegel had deteriorated.

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[Nicholas D Wolfwood]

1. I'd love to give him a lead parachute instead...

[MSgt213]

2. Workers have to make cuts but does not.

[saigon68]

4. Why am I conditioned to this??

Is anyone else here as angry about this as me?

The is very, very disgusting.

[MSgt213]

5. Angry. I'm beyond angry. Let me rant just a little bit.

First let me say if today you went out and started a company with your own money and your own sweat, tears and pain. I have absolutely no problem with you making as much money as you can and paying your workers what you feel they are worth.

However, I do have problems with people who go to business school get their MBA and join the CEO club where they just rape public companies of their profits, lay off workers, run the company into the ground and after they leave checking the dead corpse for even more money. All of these clowns are using share holders money to this crap and nothing is done about. Mean while our government is doing everything they can to take money away from the workers who actually make the company what it is. It simply outrageous. And everybody is in on it from the government to the companies to the news media.

[denverbill]

6. Some things never change.

"All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind."
-- Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations

"Our merchants and master-manufacturers complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price, and thereby lessening the sale of their goods both at home and abroad. They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people."
-- Adam Smith, Wealth Of Nations

[saigon68]

7. Excellent Rant

Took the words out of my mouth!!!!

[SharonAnn]

11. It's called "Financial Engineering", engineering the transfer of

money into their personal pockets.

So, instead of people learning how to build a business, operate a business, grow a business, they learn how to "financial engineer".

Lots of these executives (don't even have to be CEO) know absolutely nothing about starting, operating, or growing a business. They think that financial engineering is all that's needed.

Wonder how they think these businesses got started? Perhaps they wonder why some businesses even bother to build or maufacture something?

[havocmom]

3. screw workers get a bonus

tax dollars at work in corporate welfare America

[Submariner]

8. So this is where part of our $15 BILLION bailout goes ?

Glad to see me tax $ enriching another Bush whore.

[Zero Gravitas]

9. Cost Cutting?

"saying he felt obliged to do so in order that the company could implement cost cuts necessary to avoid a second trip into bankruptcy

How is this pig collecting 4.5 million after doing a lousy job the same as "cost cutting" ?

[Mokito]

10. Divine Entitlement

is what the aristocratic absolutists of the middle ages used to call it.
They really belief they are entitled to this (and even more sickening amounts) because of their origin, studies, status and title, their being part of an elite, not because of results and responsibilities. Corporate Entitlement.

[UpInArms]

12. related article: US Airways Said to Be Seeking More Concessions

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/21/business/21air.html?amp?ei=5062&en=7fdc7924e909172f&partner=GOOGLE&ex=1083211200&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1082568489-e27bFB9GxIsD5GRARxB6/A

A day after the resignation of the chief executive of US Airways, the airline's board approved a framework yesterday for a streamlining program that includes labor concessions, people briefed on the board's action said.

In an e-mail message to employees, Bruce Lakefield, the new chief executive, stressed that "fundamental changes" would be needed in the way US Airways does business.

He added that they would have to participate in restructuring the airline, the nation's seventh largest, so that it could compete with low-fare carriers.

People who had been briefed on the plan said it was essentially the same program advocated by the former chief executive, David N. Siegel.

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