Michael Eisner vs. Vietnamese Laborers
excerpted from the book
Corporate Predators
by Russel Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
Common Courage Press, 1999
If greed is good, as Michael Douglas infamously stated in
the movie Wall Street, then Disney CEO Michael Eisner must be
a saint.
Last year, the Disney executive received compensation of more
than $575 million. On top of his $750,000 salary, Eisner claimed
a $9.9 million bonus and cashed in on $565 million in stock options.
This is not the first mega-pay haul for Eisner. From 1991
to 1995, he took in $235 million. A decade ago, in 1988, he collected
more than $40 million-a compensation package which led to shrieks
of outrage.
In Eisner's defense, it can be said that giant salary grabs
are increasingly the norm among big company CEOs. Among the heads
of the largest U.S. corporations, CEO average compensation is
$5.8 million. CEO pay rose 54 percent from 1995 to 1996 (final
1997 figures are not yet in) and have risen almost 500 percent
since 1980.
Skyrocketing CEO pay does not represent a massive expansion
of the economic pie from which all corporate stake-holders are
benefiting. While executive pay increases partly reflect rising
returns to shareholders, workers have received almost none of
the benefits showered on those at the top.
Average hourly earnings for working people have actually dropped
since 1980, from $12.70 (in 1996 dollars) in 1980 to $11.81 in
1996. The ratio of big company CEO pay to factory workers' wages
has ballooned from 44 to-1 in 1965 to more than 200-to-1 today.
There is no sharing of the economic pie here.
Rising executive compensation and flat or declining wages
for workers both reflect a single reality: the diminished power
of organized labor.
If enough CEOs start taking home Eisner-like wages, then public
outrage may work to curb executive compensation. But it is hard
to imagine a concerted effort to rectify the imbalance in executive
and worker pay in the absence of a resurgent labor movement. There
are no signs of self-restraint or enlightened generosity among
the employer class.
As severe as the wage disparity is between U.S. executives
and U.S. workers, however, the differential between the executives
and Third World workers at whose expense they increasingly profit
is staggering.
Disney, to its everlasting shame, has in recent years out-sourced
production of Disney clothing and toys to sweatshops in Haiti,
Burma, Vietnam, China and elsewhere.
Last year, the Asia Monitor Resource Center, a labor monitoring
organization based in Hong Kong, reported on the operations of
Keyhinge Toys, a factory based in Da Nang City, Vietnam that makes
giveaway toys based on characters in Disney films which are distributed
with McDonald's Happy Meals. According to the Asia Monitor Resource
Center, the approximately 1,000 workers in the Keyhinge factory
in Vietnam earn six to eight cents an hour, far below the subsistence
wage estimated at 32 cents an hour. The workers-90 percent of
them young women 17-to-20-years-old-are required to work mandatory
overtime, with 9-to-10 hour shifts required seven days a week.
In February 1997, a combination of exposure to toxic solvents,
poor ventilation and exhaustion caused 200 workers to fall ill,
and 25 to collapse.
On an annual basis, the workers at Keyhinge are making approximately
$250 a year.
Less than one-fifth of Michael Eisner's pay-$100 million-would
be enough to quintuple the wages of each of the 1,000 Keyhinge
workers-giving them a still inadequate, but at least living wage-and
to pay them for 100 years! That would leave Eisner with $465 million
for 1997 alone.
To call this kind of disparity "Dickensian" is to
understate the nature of the problem dramatically. Globalization
has wrought unprecedented and unconscionable gaps in income and
wealth.
The system is out of whack, and it is going to take more than
a little tinkering to set it right.
Corporate Predators