Compensation & Self-Worth

by Dennis Green

Listening to the “Pay Czar,” the man assigned to mediate compensation packages for banking and other top executives in companies benefiting from the Bailout, I hear a remarkable assertion. “In this society, one’s compensation, the salary and bonuses and stocks and stock options aren’t just for buying another house, or another car or another vacation. It reflects your self-worth. Someone asks me, ‘How can you give me two million less than my neighbor?’ and I have to have an answer.”

It reminds me of the comments made the other day to me by two returning Iraqi War vets, who said, “We thought we were winning that war, until we got home.”

This mediator, Kenneth Feinberg, also mediated the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund payouts, a task he says only seminary could have prepared him for, considering the stories he heard. Before that, he mediated the settlement of the Agent Orange lawsuit by Vietnam vets, a payout of $180 million, the largest tort settlement of its kind at the time.

He talks about the disparity between executive and line staff pay, and the disparity between Wall Street and Main Street, but expresses some confidence that Wall Street is finally listening to populist anger over the terms of the TARP Bailout and subsequent huge bonuses. “Even the CEO of Goldman-Sachs, which was not a part of the TARP Program, consulted with me on G-S pay structure, and his own payment terms,” Feinberg relates.

But his perspective marks an enormous cultural values shift in America. There was a time when personal virtue — being a decent person — provided the most reliable measure of self-worth. But no more. That model may have begun shifting with the Robber Barons of the late 19^th Century, oil magnates like the Rockefellers and Carnegies, and then continued with manufacturing giants like Henry Ford.

So it’s more than simple greed/avarice, but also compounded by one of the other Seven Deadly Sins, pride/hubris. “I make more money than you do, and so I must be superior.” Such an attitude, or philosophy if it deserves the term, is corrosive to the dream of equality, but also intensifies what the Republicans love to call “The Class Wars.”

Unfortunately, this conviction infects even the lower classes of working stiffs. It helps explain why auto workers would rather see their company go bust than sacrifice a few of those big perks they’ve won over the years. And it may shed some light on why so many public school teachers have become bigger slackers than any of their worst students.

If teaching was once a calling, and is no longer such…if working with your hands was once the noble fulfillment of a working class existence…if bankers learned their lessons in the 1930s…all these advancements in our understanding of self-worth and status have been lost.

What Kenneth Feinberg hears all the time from people he is attempting to provide with a little reality therapy is that what’s on the inside doesn’t count anymore, nor even what’s on the outside of a persona. Only compensation is the true measure of a man, or a woman too for that matter. And if that’s what we’ve come to, our craven materialism is even worse than I thought.

©2010 Dennis Green