Friday, February 27, 2009

Australia's Obscene CEOs

OK, time for a bit of a rant on this. We all know that Sol Trujillo managed to achieve no positive motion whatsoever for the Australian consumers whilst he was CEO of Telstra and that he got a $30m handshake deal for this lack of motion with the extra bonus of sacking thousands of Telstra staff during his tenure. Corporate responsibility is obviously something Telstra either knows absolutely nothing about or knows a lot about and knows even more about how to avoid it.

We all hope that whoever Telstra hires to replace Sol is someone who knows how to run a communications company (monopoly) so that it not only benefits themselves and their shareholders, but also their clients. That's something that's been badly needed for years.

Now, add to this the outright theft of about $1.2m from Pacific Brands' staff by their CEO, Sue Morphet. Last year she went from an already excessive package of $685,ooo and change (as the GM of their Underwear and Hosiery Division) to $1.86m (as their CEO) and at the same time has sacked (and is planning to sack) 1,800 staff and is moving a lot of their work offshore to "offset rising costs". I wonder if they can continue to justify this corporate greed, social irresponsibility and wanton destruction of people's lives if we all stop buying anything they make? And remember, with Pacific Brands it isn't just their CEO who's taking from the poor, but other executive management as well.

Remember, also, that Pacific Brands received $15m from the government over the last 2 years to retool and reskill. It looks like the executives reskilled their new cars and bank accounts with this money.

If you want to send a message to Pacific Brands that lets them know how you feel about this corporate irresponsibility, have a look at their website to see which brands to avoid buying - and let your friends know not only what they are doing to their staff, but with our money (the $15m of taxpayer funding they received).

And don't think it stops with just these two - there's a lot more out there who need to be brought into the attention of the public, especially in these GFC times. Fair's fair.

Regards,

The Outspoken Wookie

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Well said!

There is some pretty ordinary behaviour in the IT space as well. For example IM sacking 20 staff recently and sending their jobs to Malaysia. Looks like the incoming MD, Jay Miley is a toe-cutter.

http://www.arnnet.com.au/article/276412/ingram_micro_sends_jobs_malaysia

We need to speak out about this sort of misguided thinking.