The 10 Highest-Paid CEOs Who Laid Off The Most Workers: Institute For Policy Studies (PHOTOS)

A grim fact of the recession is that it pays to lay people off.

The CEOs who laid off the most employees during the recession are also the CEOs who took home the biggest pay checks, according to a study released last week.

CEOs of the 50 U.S. firms that slashed the most jobs between November 2008 and April 2010 took in 42 percent more than the average CEO at an S&P 500 firm, according to the 17th annual Executive Excess study by the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive Washington think tank.

The study (PDF) also found that 36 of the 50 layoff leaders "announced their mass layoffs at a time of positive earnings reports," suggesting a trend of "squeezing workers to boost profits and maintain high CEO pay."

The 10 "highest-paid CEO layoff leaders" ranked in the report include the CEO of Hewlett-Packard, Mark Hurd, who earned $24.2 million in 2009 as the company laid off 6,400 workers and Walmart CEO Michael Duke, who earned $19.2 million as the company laid off 13,350 workers. No Wall Street banks were included in this list, but three banks -- Citigroup, Bank Of America and JP Morgan -- showed up on the study's list of the 50 firms that laid off the most employees.

Overall, the study found that executive pay remains astronomically high compared to previous decades. "After adjusting for inflation, CEO pay in 2009 more than doubled the CEO pay average for the decade of the 1990s, more than quadrupled the CEO pay average for the 1980s, and ran approximately eight times the CEO average for all the decades of the mid-20th century," the study says. Currently, CEOs of major U.S. companies average 263 times the average compensation of American workers, the study claims.

Check out Institute for Policy Studies' ranking of layoff leaders among the highest-paid CEOS:

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10. Ivan Seidenberg -- Verizon

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Total Compensation 2009: $17,485,796 Announced Annual Layoffs (11/1/08-4/1/10): 21,308

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Total Compensation 2009: $17,485,796
Announced Annual Layoffs (11/1/08-4/1/10): 21,308

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Made The Tough Choices Leaned Too Heavily On Layoffs

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Comments

[Charles Richard Brown]

04:08 PM on 10/20/2010

All white guys... who da thunk it?

[pinkpoodle79]

03:51 PM on 09/23/2010

Wow...these people somehow manage to pull all of this off without being thrown in jail...yet a person caught with possession of a little marijuana ends up in the slammer. What a twisted world we live in.

[EliteBeave]

01:27 PM on 09/20/2010

It's all good, the thousands they fired can feel the CEOs' bank accounts trickling down onto them... like a sweet summer rain.

[Richard Eaton]

10:51 AM on 09/19/2010

Here's a thought!! This is easy to track, easy to confirm and makes good sense and will wind up being called Protectionism. Simply put....
1. Any company whose % of profite and sales are generated in the USA (including overseas companies) should be required to employ that same % of US workers. Also that the same % of the product be manufactured in the USA. WE SHOULD DEMAND THIS!!
2. If a company does not comply FINE them and take away all their PERKS and TAX BREAKS.

We won't do this because all the money that these top execs and stock holders make would go back to a fair share instead of their greedy cut. What this article does not refer to is how many of these job cuts were sent overseas. I for one would like to talk to someone I can understand and relate to.

[kulturkampf]

06:21 PM on 09/16/2010

You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations.There are no peoples...There are no "Third Worlds" There is no "West." There is only one holistic system of system,one vast and immense,interwoven,interacting multi-variate, multi-national dominion of dollars!...It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet.That is the natural order of things today.You get up and howl about America and democracy.There is no America. There is no democracy.There is only IBM,and ITT,and AT&T,and Dupont,Dow,Union Carbide,and Exxon-those are the nations of the world today...The world is a college of corporations,inexorably determined by the immutable by-laws of business.The world is a business... PADDY CHAYEVSKY/NETWORK

[aosborneh2o]

07:57 PM on 09/13/2010

Welcome to unbridled capitalism my friends... Only huge, homogeneous corporations to realistically choose from in most places, making it more and more difficult not buying from at least one or more of these dirtbags. This is NOT what Adam Smith had in mind...

[MaryBethC3]

08:09 PM on 09/09/2010

Can't something legal be done against these CEO's? Isn't there a crime in there somewhere?

There was a hate crime case some years ago where a white supremacist had a following of people who, to make a long story short, committed criminal acts. He himself never did so, only his followers. The state filed charges against the leader even though he was not actually the one committing the hate crimes. The essence of his defense was, not surprisingly, his rights to free speech under the first amendment. The district attorney didn't want the leader to get off scott free and came up with an ingenious idea. He argued that the right to free speech did not include the right to incite violence. The white supremacist was convicted.

I thought of this case when reading about these CEO's. They have a right to make money, to earn a living, but shouldn't there be something criminal when their profits are so excessive that it hurts the economy in which and through which they are enabled to make that money?

[isis]

10:35 AM on 09/11/2010

I have stocks and I noticed that if there are layoffs the stock price goes up and so do the dividends. It made me discouraged and I stopped buying stocks. Perhaps there needs to be something the equivalent of PAX World for those who want to invest in stocks that treat the workers well. A tax on CEOs might do the trick too.

[MJinCanada]

07:43 PM on 09/17/2010

In response to people with the same issues, our credit union came up with investment options called ethical funds focusing on companies and industries with less pollution and exploitation and more social good will. Can't afford them myself, wish I could.

[Sonja Dupor]

07:25 PM on 09/08/2010

Disgusting.

[Batoche]

06:34 PM on 09/08/2010

It just makes me ill - the decline of America, I'm sorry to say.

[tokyomary]

09:46 AM on 09/07/2010

Collective motto: Do evil and get well paid for it.

[ForTheGreaterGood2]

01:08 PM on 09/06/2010

This is amazing....when will they realize that soon there will be no one left to buy their wares. This country used to be based on the land of opportunity - not only are these geezers committing the greatest scam but right under our very eyes. Yeah the unions are killing us, but if this continues, this country will have 2 classes - the rich and the poor - no middle.

Wake up people, the board members vote these guys in and everyone gets a their share of the pretty penny except us. The people who not laid off are guilt ridden, scared to death and are worked to death for the right to have a job.

We the little people buy the stock hoping and praying for a little bit of wealth. What we are really getting is an opportunistic few at the top who are soaking us under the guise of our capitalistic bill of rights. Who is worth 25,000/hr? Are you kidding? Stop the madness, don't buy it unless it is made here, quit buying their stock and/or their products unless these thieves step down.

[John-in-Exile]

03:44 PM on 09/07/2010

No, the unions are not killing us. The unions were the strongest in the 1950's and 60's and we were far and away the most prosperous country in the world. We have heard wealthy liars tell this anti-union story ever since the 1980 election of the union-busting Ronald Reagan, who turned American industry loose to bust their union contracts and send all the jobs overseas. If we still had the jobs that have been "outsourced" in the last thirty years we would have a prosperous middle class that could spend us out of this recession. However, those jobs are gone, the executive class have become conscienceless thieves, the middle class is merely a nostalgic memory, and now we are honoring the spokespeople for the thieves as if they were economic geniuses. To realize how bankrupt the system is, we are about to extend tax benefits for the thieves who have taken the most advantage of the culture of the last thirty years. We are so stupid and we are so screwed!

[PoliSciJunkie]

02:29 PM on 09/09/2010

The unions are not killing us. They are standing up for their workers. If workers were smart more would unionize as it's the only leverage an employee has these day with rapacious corporations who believe their workers are their enemies. There is an old maxim in labor and industrial relations-- management gets the union it deserves. If the union is killing a company, it is because the company has been trying to kill their employees economically. The only other defense is self-employment but most people are not psychologically cut out to be self employed.

[Ron1951]

08:52 PM on 09/04/2010

Can't you really just feel it trickling down on you?

[MaryBethC3]

11:22 PM on 09/04/2010

That's it exactly. This all comes from the malignant economic ideas embraced in the Ronald Reagan era, not the least of which was the idea that making the rich richer would benefit everyone.

They didn't invest in our nation. They kept it. f & f

[Ron1951]

03:44 PM on 09/09/2010

You've got it correct. Boehner and company are making such a big deal about Peter Orszag's comments about the Bush tax cuts. Orszag has come out and said it was just an idea, not a recomendation.

When David Stockman left the Reagan economic team he basically said what Bush 41 said when he was running against Reagan: voodoo economics. I could go into this at some length, but basically, economics is based on math. If the math doesn't work, the theory behind the math is not correct. The Laffer Curve, the theory underlying trickle down economics fails the math test. Nobody bothered to check to see if the theory was valid before implementing it. Stockman called them out, and they called him every name in the book.

[troyrobertdavid]

03:30 PM on 09/09/2010

It's not money I feel trickling down from these greedy Bast***s.

[MJinCanada]

07:46 PM on 09/17/2010

And the warm feeling isn't happiness.

[Ioan Lightoller]

02:25 PM on 09/04/2010

This is the country these people have wanted for a LONG time now. They are obscene and the government does nothing to stop them. Hell, it broke the back of the unions by consistently siding with the corporatocracy. The anti-trust laws once in place have been gutted...

And here these sick, greedy f***s get richer while people die because they cannot pay for medicines or care which would extend their lives and the unemployed are told that they don't have jobs because they would rather be lazy or leeches...

[MaryBethC3]

11:25 PM on 09/04/2010

Amen. And they know full well and couldn't care less.

[stellaone23]

04:36 AM on 09/08/2010

nothing will change until we realize that they and the government are one and the same. these same people use the revolving door in and out of government, in and out of the same businesses they regulate and contract with. and in between are the lobbyist in and out of the same doors. meanwhile, we fall for the smoke and theatrics and slight of hand.

there was a system long ago where the people who did the work didn't benefit from their labor and had to settle for the scraps left over, while the top cats sat pretty feasting on the fat of the land. it was called slavery. for capitalism to work for the capitalist, cheap labor (be it slave or "minimum wage") is necessary. they shared the wealth just long enough to figure out how to reconfigure the old system. and now they have.

until those who were in the middle ban together with those who have always been at the bottom, and realize that those at the top see them all the same, and do something to change this system, and the people in charge of it - we will all be working in the fields for slop and shacks. but as long as the top can convince the middle that it's the people at the bottom who are trying to take what they have - they will continue to laugh all the way to too big to fail.

[xargaw]

02:02 PM on 09/04/2010

While the compensation of these men can only be viewed as obscene, the CEO of Schering-Plough has to be the worst. Almost fifty million dollars and Americans are dying because they cannot afford their medications. There has to be special place in H**L for these people. I really can't understand how a human being can take that kind of money knowing that his company is allowing so much suffering.

[Ioan Lightoller]

02:26 PM on 09/04/2010

Fanned AND faved!

[elisha job]

08:32 AM on 09/06/2010

It's sickening. And this donkey and his company SPlough, along with his fellow pharma co-whores, are permitted to advertise directly to consumers, the same ones who can't afford their products and getting sick and dying as a result of their astronomical prices. I wonder why the US is the only country in the world that allows this type of business practise? Capitalism.

[GBPackerfan]

07:06 PM on 09/03/2010

These are the guys McConnell and Boehner want to "protect" from the sunsetting of the Bush tax cuts. Don't let it happen, people--write your congressman!

[Ioan Lightoller]

02:28 PM on 09/04/2010

From its inception, the graduated income tax has been one big joke--you and I pay through the teeth whilst those who own most of the wealth in this country pay little or no tax. I don't debate the need for taxes, but it should be a flat-rate tax and everyone pays, NO EXCEPTIONS except for those below a certain level.

[Ron1951]

08:54 PM on 09/04/2010

unnecessary to write your congressperson. The republicans will vote in lockstep and filibuster this in the Senate--where legislation goes to die.