CORPORATE GREED: ONE (VERY CAPABLE) AUTO CEO's VIEW

Chrysler CEO, Sergio Marchionne, slams income disparity


Sergio Marchionne, chief executive of Chrysler Group LLC and Fiat SpA, told business leaders Tuesday they have a "moral responsibility" to address the growing income disparity between the rich and poor that is at the heart of the current Occupy Wall Street movement by curtailing excessive executive compensation and corporate greed.


At the same time, he said he would be seeking concessions in 2012 from his own workers during Chrysler's coming round oflabour negotiations with the Canadian Auto Workers.


While Mr. Marchionne acknowledged the Occupy Wall Street movement itself was at times incoherent, its central tenants of addressing the wealth gap and corporate greed need to be addressed, something he has witnessed himself at a board level over the years.


"I have seen an incredible amount of corporate greed sitting on these boards," he said after a speech at the Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants in Toronto. "Things that I never thought were possible. I have seen the most inane displays of greed for the last 10 years, and I think that must stop."


"If it doesn't stop, the movement will continue. It will continue to get stronger."


Mr. Marchionne said he didn't believe this needed to be addressed by government intervention, but rather at the board level. In fact, he said U.S. President Barack Obama's support of the Occupy movement was "somewhat unhelpful:'


"As much as you may agree with the ideological level, you cannot agree with the form of the protest. Not if you're the president of the United States," the high profile Italian-Canadian executive said.


That is why he encouraged business leaders to address the "root" of the issue at the board level or risk having legislation forced upon them.

"One of the things that also has to be looked at is the whole issue of executive compensation:' he said. "It's very, very difficult to have discussions with organized labour about pay packages when you have fundamental inequalities in the system."



Despite Mr. Marchionne eloquently quoting Pierre Trudeau, Leo Tolstoy and Nelson Mandela in his speech in Toronto, he is hardly the everyman himself. He made roughly €3.47-million [$4.9-million] as the head of Fiat SpA, Fiat Industrial and Chrysler in 2010.


At the same time, Mr. Marchionne said he would be looking for concessions from the CAW in their upcoming round of labour negotiations in 2012. He has also been on the record saying he does not support the two tier wage system adopted by Chrysler workers in the U.S., and would like to see a single wage that is lower than the top tier.


"I don't like the notion of entitlement either:' he said. "If we're all in the same boat, then if I'm doing well I will pay you much more than you would have gotten as a tier one. But if we're in the sewers, don't expect your role preserved when everyone else is drowning:'


He said that might come in the form of incentives, or profit sharing. But he said the Canadian workers would have to be at least as competitive as their counterparts south of the border if they wanted to continue to win new work, especially now that the dollar is not providing a buffer for manufacturers here.


While he thanked the Canadian and Ontario governments for the $2.9-billion bailout package they gave Chrysler in 2009 during its restructuring, he said Chrysler would be making product decisions based on economics going forward and that Canadian operations needed to be as competitive as the U.S. operations, where wages are substantially lower, to win work. "You cannot have all things. You cannot have a strong currency, cannot have an uncompetitive wage rate and expect Chrysler or all the other car makers to keep on making cars in the country," he said.




But Ken Lewenza, CAW president, said Mr. Marchionne had better get "concessions" out of his vocabulary heading into the negotiations next year.


''When he makes those kind of comments, then I have to obviously educate him on the productivity of our workforce, and the quality of our workforce, because when it comes to compensation, there is a correlation between good productivity and our compensation:' he said. "I was always told by the Chrysler management team that as long as you're productive, wages aren't on the radar screen."


Scott Deveau
Financial Post
Nov. 23, 2011

CHARACTER AND PURPOSE - IN LIFE AND IN DEATH: STEVE JOBS

A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve Jobs


Then, Steve became ill and we watched his life compress into a smaller circle. Once, he’d loved walking through Paris. He’d discovered a small handmade soba shop in Kyoto. He downhill skied gracefully. He cross-country skied clumsily. No more.


Eventually, even ordinary pleasures, like a good peach, no longer appealed to him.


Yet, what amazed me, and what I learned from his illness, was how much was still left after so much had been taken away.


I remember my brother learning to walk again, with a chair. After his liver transplant, once a day he would get up on legs that seemed too thin to bear him, arms pitched to the chair back. He’d push that chair down the Memphis hospital corridor towards the nursing station and then he’d sit down on the chair, rest, turn around and walk back again. He counted his steps and, each day, pressed a little farther.


Laurene got down on her knees and looked into his eyes.


“You can do this, Steve,” she said. His eyes widened. His lips pressed into each other.


He tried. He always, always tried, and always with love at the core of that effort. He was an intensely emotional man.


I realized during that terrifying time that Steve was not enduring the pain for himself. He set destinations: his son Reed’s graduation from high school, his daughter Erin’s trip to Kyoto, the launching of a boat he was building on which he planned to take his family around the world and where he hoped he and Laurene would someday retire.


Even ill, his taste, his discrimination and his judgment held. He went through 67 nurses before finding kindred spirits and then he completely trusted the three who stayed with him to the end. Tracy. Arturo. Elham.


One time when Steve had contracted a tenacious pneumonia his doctor forbid everything — even ice. We were in a standard I.C.U. unit. Steve, who generally disliked cutting in line or dropping his own name, confessed that this once, he’d like to be treated a little specially.


I told him: Steve, this is special treatment.


He leaned over to me, and said: “I want it to be a little more special.”


Intubated, when he couldn’t talk, he asked for a notepad. He sketched devices to hold an iPad in a hospital bed. He designed new fluid monitors and x-ray equipment. He redrew that not-quite-special-enough hospital unit. And every time his wife walked into the room, I watched his smile remake itself on his face.


For the really big, big things, you have to trust me, he wrote on his sketchpad. He looked up. You have to.


By that, he meant that we should disobey the doctors and give him a piece of ice.


None of us knows for certain how long we’ll be here. On Steve’s better days, even in the last year, he embarked upon projects and elicited promises from his friends at Apple to finish them. Some boat builders in the Netherlands have a gorgeous stainless steel hull ready to be covered with the finishing wood. His three daughters remain unmarried, his two youngest still girls, and he’d wanted to walk them down the aisle as he’d walked me the day of my wedding.


We all — in the end — die in medias res. In the middle of a story. Of many stories.


I suppose it’s not quite accurate to call the death of someone who lived with cancer for years unexpected, but Steve’s death was unexpected for us.


What I learned from my brother’s death was that character is essential: What he was, was how he died.


Tuesday morning, he called me to ask me to hurry up to Palo Alto. His tone was affectionate, dear, loving, but like someone whose luggage was already strapped onto the vehicle, who was already on the beginning of his journey, even as he was sorry, truly deeply sorry, to be leaving us.


He started his farewell and I stopped him. I said, “Wait. I’m coming. I’m in a taxi to the airport. I’ll be there.”


“I’m telling you now because I’m afraid you won’t make it on time, honey.”


When I arrived, he and his Laurene were joking together like partners who’d lived and worked together every day of their lives. He looked into his children’s eyes as if he couldn’t unlock his gaze.


Until about 2 in the afternoon, his wife could rouse him, to talk to his friends from Apple.


Then, after awhile, it was clear that he would no longer wake to us.


His breathing changed. It became severe, deliberate, purposeful. I could feel him counting his steps again, pushing farther than before.


This is what I learned: he was working at this, too. Death didn’t happen to Steve, he achieved it.


He told me, when he was saying goodbye and telling me he was sorry, so sorry we wouldn’t be able to be old together as we’d always planned, that he was going to a better place.


Dr. Fischer gave him a 50/50 chance of making it through the night.


He made it through the night, Laurene next to him on the bed sometimes jerked up when there was a longer pause between his breaths. She and I looked at each other, then he would heave a deep breath and begin again.


This had to be done. Even now, he had a stern, still handsome profile, the profile of an absolutist, a romantic. His breath indicated an arduous journey, some steep path, altitude.


He seemed to be climbing.


But with that will, that work ethic, that strength, there was also sweet Steve’s capacity for wonderment, the artist’s belief in the ideal, the still more beautiful later.


Steve’s final words, hours earlier, were monosyllables, repeated three times.


Before embarking, he’d looked at his sister Patty, then for a long time at his children, then at his life’s partner, Laurene, and then over their shoulders past them.


Steve’s final words were:


OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.


Mona Simpson is a novelist and a professor of English at the University of
California, Los Angeles. She delivered this eulogy for her brother, Steve Jobs,
on Oct. 16 at his memorial service at the Memorial Church of Stanford University.
October 30, 2011