One would think that a company struggling and bleeding customers like Sprint would have executives bleeding themselves. Not so. Even after their obvious hardship to stay competitive, the fines and fees they’ve paid out for various reasons, like settling on litigation against ETFs, Sprint/Nextel executives are tops when it comes to compensation. It’s not a surprise that corporate bigwigs are still getting paid despite poor performance, but it does irk a few consumers. According to Standard & Poor’s index of large companies, Sprint had the worst pay-for-performance in 2007 — imagine that. Sprint spokesperson James Fisher said “It’s very important to consider that 2007 was a highly unusual year because of compensation that was paid to an exiting CEO, as well as sign-on compensation paid to a new CEO,” and continued their defense, “We had significant other severance charges for executive changes during the year.” Whatever dude.
Of course, there is a new CEO in Dan Hesse, a man who prides Sprint in the fact that consumers can e-mail him “directly” with questions and concerns. Hesse replaced Gary Forsee (We wonder if Forsee foresaw his own demise) who received $22.4 million in total compensation last year… got to love severance packages. Another $74 million went to the rest of the top management team. This kind of corporate behavior, amongst other things, is part of the reason we’re struggling and resorting to multi-billion-dollar bailouts.
Thanks, Marie!
