To Be Retained or To Be Hired?

Executives in corporate culture are said to be "retained" rather than "hired". The thinking behind this is that they are perennial free agents who allow themselves, for an enormous fee, to be temporarily restrained and detained by the tasks given them by the corporation, hence "retained". The thinking must be that without those grotesque sums the corporate executive would just fly off like the statues of Daedalus. He is, after all, not committed to the mission of the company nor its product, nor its public service, but to himself and his peculiar need for enormous compensation packages. The ordinary worker, on the other hand, is merely "hired"and he receives a small wage, market value. The inequality is therefore no mere linguistic phenomena, for the difference between being "retained" and being "hired" has grown increasingly important from the perspective of "compensation". The average executive salary is now over 500 times that of the average employee and this does not include the numerous compensation packages that are loaded on as retainer fees and retaining bonuses, etc. For the latest case of such outrageous inequity, read of the case of Robert Nardelli, 5 year executive of Home Depot, who was awarded 245 million in compensation even while the stock price declined: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/24/business/24board.html?hp&ex=1148529600&en=a674c85cd979cd3e&ei=5094&partner=homepage
These kinds of executive compensation cases are so frequently reported nowadays that one has no choice but to be apathetic lest one become a furious mess. What gets me the most is how these slick, smug liars are able to look at themselves in the mirror and think, "yeah, I deserve it!" You go girl!

Of course, it is the "Board" who decides upon the precise compensation for retaining the executive. But as the NY Times article makes clear, the "Board" is often nothing other than a small group of similarly situated executives who serve on each others "Boards" that decide upon "just" compensation for each other. When one looks upon this Ponzi scheme, run by an elite few at the top, it is hard not to think that capitalism is structurally flawed to the core. A better system, and one which is recommended by socialists of all stripes (such as Pareconomists and Economic Democrats) would turn over the issue of executive compensation to worker councils rather than corporate boards. This system would not work, of course, unless the proletariat became fully class conscious and significantly better educated in the virtues of democratic self-rule. But our corporate culture casts its sickly pall over the entire productive apparatus from education in earliest childhood to end-of-life nursing homes and the expectations of a social safety net. They would never allow true democracy to shape the productive process. After all, the only function of the "good american people" is to be cannon fodder, consumers, and laborers for their corporate executive masters. And that is how it is "supposed to be".