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MANY TIMES OVER
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How much work must you do for $100 million a year?
By MURRY FRYMER
of TheColumnists.com
If you are going to write a Christmas column, it has to be a good-news column. I had just about given up finding a subject that would work this year-what with Iraq and Bush and Sudan and Iran and take-your-pick-and then I found a real good news story.
If you are an employee of Goldman Sachs, an investment outfit, then the news is deliriously good. You are going to get a bonus, on average, of about $625,000 for Christmas. I haven’t made a mistake with those zeroes. Yes, indeed, the average holiday bonus at Goldman Sachs this year will be $625,000 for its thousands of workers.
And, hey, if that sounds skimpy-heck, what do I know about Wall Street?-then read this next sentence slowly. The top execs at this happy financial outfit, will pull in $100 million. And that is just the bonus.
Being a newspaperman, where I never learned to count that high, I had to ask myself what do Wall Street executives do to get that kind of slap on the back? One guy, on TV, without a blush, said, well, “I worked very hard this year.”
Of course, he did. But he didn’t work in Iraq, where our G.I. employees make somewhat less. I know over at McDonald’s, the minimum wage is $5.15 an hour and I don’t think I would like to do that work. Seems kind of hard to me.
No, I really have to scratch my head to figure out what hard work on Wall Street is that pays so well. I think I’ve got it. To make $100 million a year you have to game the system. Nobody can actually earn that money, unless you are a hot Japanese pitcher for the Red Sox or Mel Gibson or a number of others who can get billions of people to line up to see your work. You have to be very unique and the world has to recognize that.
But the Wall Street execs aren’t that unique. There are tens of thousands of them and nobody buys tickets to see them work. No, these men and women have come upon a system of remuneration that is exempt from the rules. They get filthy rich because Wall Street is filthy rich and there really is no limit to what can be earned.
Knowing that, I wonder why I didn’t go to work on Wall Street. It isn’t brain surgery, which also pays well but involves getting splattered with blood and stuff like that. No, this is money surgery. You go inside the system and you find the money and you spread it around. And while you are spreading, you take a few fistfuls for yourself.
The men and women at the newspaper where I last worked, the San Jose Mercury News, are not having that kind of Christmas. Another 27 of them in the newsroom lost their jobs this week. Over at Newsday, where I also worked, dozens more are losing their jobs. The execs who are laying them off are doing OK. There’s that word again: execs.
Anyway, I didn’t want my Christmas column to be all sour grapes. Heck, I would love to bring home $100 million for Christmas, though I really don’t know what I would do with it. I understand that Mel Gibson buys islands and puts homes on them. He has lots of islands.
No, the struggle to figure out how to spend a hundred million would probably keep me up at night and now I sleep soundly.
Still, if I had to do it all over again, I think I might have foregone the joy of writing a newspaper story or column, which was fun all right, and maybe gone to get an MBA and learned the difference between a stock and a bond. I am sure it would require hard work.
But, yes, I would have fled the newsroom, where you get fired at Christmas, and sold my soul to get a mailroom job at Goldman Sachs.
Oh, they said on the news that one executive’s bonus could feed half a million children for a number of years. I can’t remember the number. I was blinded by the $100 million cash.
For which you have to work hard for a whole year.
©2006 by Murry
Frymer. The Murry Frymer caricature is
©2000 by Jim Hummel. The cartoon is from IMSI's Master Clips
Collection, 1895 Francisco Blvd. E., San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506,
USA. This column first posted Dec. 18, 2006.
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