On Businessmen and Businessboys

We are seeing, in the corporate world, the bitter fruits that spring from mortgaging the future to maintain, for the incompetent, the false prosperity of the present. The first instance on display is the sad United Auto Workers convention in Las Vegas (and how fitting, this, that they should gather in a city devoted to the notion that wealth should be amassed via luck rather than value creation), during which the press learned that Ford is considering a massive investment in Mexico. Predictably the union bosses are atwitter with agitation over the perceived betrayal. How could Ford consider building cars in another country when they have us, with our inflated wages and bureaucratic work rules, our "Jobs Bank" which is in fact precisely the opposite, our reflexive entitlement mentality and pharisaical inflexibility? How dare they?

It is indeed a mystery.

The second instance is in the halls of wisdom known as Delta Airline's corporate headquarters, where today the company is depositing on the laps of U.S. taxpayers its untenable $10.6 billion pension obligations to its pilots, the largest such shirking in the history of the ill-fated Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. Former Delta chieftains had, in effect, purchased peace with their unions by creating obligations they would not have to fulfill. Decades later, after the reign of incompetence at Delta has reached its logical conclusion in bankruptcy, it is you and I who will pay for their malfeasance.

Perhaps a simple reform is in order, both for union bosses and corporate heads, something like the following: should your agreements on pay and benefits ever prove greater than can be borne by the company's assets, you will be held personally liable for some equivalent percentage of your own net wealth. Harsh, yes, but perhaps the Gettelfingers and Wagoners and Mullins of the world -- politicians all who have no business playing the adult game of business -- will tread more lightly when they are assured that the value they destroy will be visited upon them apiece.