And the press obsessed over whether autoworkers make $70 an hour?
February 12, 2009 3:44 pm ET by Eric Boehlert
WSJ headline today: "Merrill Gave $1 Million Each to 700 of Its Staff"
According to the newspaper:
Merrill Lynch & Co. "secretly" moved up the date it awarded bonuses for 2008 and richly rewarded its executives despite billions of dollars in losses, giving bonuses of $1 million or more apiece to nearly 700 employees, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said.
Sorta makes you wonder about that media microscope that was used late last year to scrutinize the pay of middle class autoworkers, doesn't it?
The place that I used to work at (up until this week), we had to meet or exceed certain goals throughout 2008 before we would even see any bonus at all. We doubled the profit we were supposed to make, and we got a decent bonus (14% of our base salaries), but we did really good. These financial institutions lost BILLIONS and they still think that they should get a bonus? Freakin' laughable, very laughable.