The beautiful people at WorldCom really added to the humanity of their bankruptcy today by acknowledging that they should pay their laid-off employees’ severance before paying back their creditors. We should really give them a hand, perhaps a Nobel prize.
What bunch of asinine lawyers thought of this? They actually admitted in court that the reason they wanted to give the employees the money they are owed is they want to avoid the public relations fallout that Enron faced when it stiffed its employees. They actually had the gall to stand up and attest to the fact that they don’t care about the welfare and well-being of their employees.
They made this move simply to stave off PR problems. What was also hidden under the headlines is that every employee who takes this settlement has to sign a “General Release” stating that they will not sue the company or its executives for the nosedive that the WorldCom stock took. Also hidden behind the gray sheen of Italian suits was the fact that this agreement has no bearing whatsoever on the $1.5 million that the CEO will receive every year for the rest of his life as a severance package. That sounds like a sweet deal to me. Run a company into the ground, waste every cent of your employee’s life savings, cost them millions in severance packages and get paid $1.5 million a year forever. Meanwhile, each laid-off employee will receive something like a one-time payment of $9,000 and 6 months of insurance coverage, and they had to fight in court to get that.
Most of the time, you could call me a “capitalist pig” and you wouldn’t be far off. I normally don’t have a problem with every person trying to the best for himself as far as the economy and law will allow. But the sick injustice of this situation knocks me back down to the workers’ level, especially when I realize that WorldCom did pull a PR coup in all this.
They’ll come out looking like shepherds dispensing sunshine to the flock, while the employees’ lot will play out like greedy sad sacks. Somewhere, Bernie Ebbers, WorldCom ex-CEO, is smiling.