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| Yay! I make 943 times what the average worker makes at McKesson! |
That puts McKesson right behind Walmart when it comes to CEO plundering of a company and abuse of employees.
Walmart CEO Mike Duke makes 6,132 times what the average Walmart worker earns, according to the Huffington Post. Walmart claims it cares for its workers, but it has a funny way of showing it: A Walmart store in Ohio is running a Thanksgiving food drive for its own employees who are so underpaid they need charitable donations to have a holiday dinner. Yum, canned peas!
Hammergren empathizes with his employees the same way Duke does. In McKesson's Lakeland, Fla., warehouse, workers don't earn enough to afford health insurance. The workers voted to join the Teamsters, and now the company is threatening and harassing them in a by-the-book union-busting effort.
Hammergren's signal achievement at McKesson was racking up nearly $1 billion in fines for price-fixing and Medicaid fraud. Now he claims he's concerned about government debt (he's not) and wants to lower it. Presumably he wasn't too worried about contributing to the government debt while he was looting the Treasury.
Hammergren belongs to that uniquely loathsome group, Fix the Debt, which wants to cut your Social Security. The Institute for Policy Studies found three of the Fix the Debt CEOs who want to impoverish millions of retirees have pensions of more than $100 million each. Hammergren has the largest retirement fortune of the three: $144.3 million.
Another group aiming to throw millions into poverty, the Business Roundtable, is made up of CEOs whose retirement savings are 1,200 times bigger than the average worker's.
The Nation recently exposed the shocking cruelty of Fix the Debt and the Business Roundtable. Reports The Nation:
These CEOs aren’t just trying to short the average American retiree; they’re throwing their own under the bus. While raising alarm about the federal debt, Business Roundtable CEOs have run up massive deficits in their employees’ pension funds. According to the report, ten companies led by members of Business Roundtable have shortfalls in their employee pension funds of between $4.9 and $22.6 billion. The largest of those belongs to General Electric, run by Business Roundtable and Fix the Debt member Jeffrey Immelt, the prospective beneficiary of a $59.3 million retirement fund.
GE stopped offering traditional pension plans for new employees in 2011, forcing workers to switch to 401(k) plans. Many other companies have shifted the burden of retirement savings to their employees in this way in recent years, and that’s been a significant driver of the retirement crisis. Just 18 percent of workers can expect traditional pensions today, compared with 38 percent in 1985. Instead of getting a fixed check, retirees are at the mercy of the market—making the assurance of Social Security benefits even more essential.How did we ever let this happen?
