Yes, and over the years, they have left tons of money laying on the table.
Well, I suppose it would be difficult to find any company that has not done precisely that, some by omission, others by necessity...IBM has done a bit of both, the latter in part thanks to the DOJ.
If they were burdened with having to pay people to stay at home, to pay their 400,000 employees 6-8x what the market rates for their salaries are, what do you think that would do to their profit margin?
GM pays its employees 6-8x market rates? Geez...why didn't Wagoner bring it up this morning? Instead he conceded that the success of the company depended on innovation and new products like the Malibu, or the CTS or the Volt.
If you restated their balance sheet for cumulative effect over 30 years of overpaying employees, what do you think THAT would look like?
Earth to i-node...they were, voluntarily. If they restated their balance sheets for 30 years, as you say, with GM type benefits, they'd report additional earnings.
Do you know why there is no union at IBM? Because it gave its employees voluntarily pay and benefits GM had to coerced into providing. Up until recently IBM had some of the most liberal benefits in the business. You could take 256 consecutive days off, full pay, for illness. After which you went into disability pay at 60% of full for an additional 2 years, after which they retired you basically with 40% pay...all you had to have is 5 years of service. You retired with 60% of salary at 30 years, or 55 years of age with 20 years of service. IBM has since changed its practices, pulling back on benefits substantially...but it still paid us very well. When I retired from IBM, I went to work for a smaller fabless chip company based in silicon valley...they were quite shocked to find out what my IBM package was...
Al |
