Dr Peter Rost decided to write an open letter to Jeff Kindler, the CEO of Pfizer about the morals of accepting his pay raise of 36% over his base salary of $11.4 million after downsizing 10,000 employees. Interesting read, quite a few people are for/against and bring up interesting arguments about how Kindler is helping the other employees of Pfizer. Personally - CEOs should provide some sort of minimal employee assistance to people downsized (read: fired) and take responsibility for them beyond simply signing on the dotted line to let them go.
Read about it here.
Well if those fired didn’t get this employee assistance put into their contracts when they signed on to work, can they really expect it? But it might be better for the employees to take responsibilities for their own contigency plans/income insurance - hefty severance packages cause labour market inefficiencies that inevitably harm employees and would-be-employees in the end.
Well, I’m not saying there needs to be a “massive” amount of employee assistance, maybe 2 to 4 weeks to let people know that their assistance is no longer required and that they have up to a month to get things under control and look for alternative employment.
This sort of action would engender good will rather than walking in one day to find you’ve been fired, or in the worst case, being frogmarched to the door as you’re now a “security risk”.
I can’t vouch for how Pfizer handled the layoffs, but to my mind, CEO’s are a massive drain on a company with their “hefty severance packages” - regardless of whether they do well or not. Unfortunately, it seems the majority of stockholders see only the bottom line profit/loss figures, and are not that much concerned about downsizing (the CEO’s favourite way of making a profit when they can’t figure out how to do it otherwise).