Robert “Steve” Miller is a
“corporate turnaround specialist,” but his specialty really
amounts to nothing more than whacking blue-collar workers. Miller was brought in as CEO of Delphi Corp. in July
2005 in the wake of an accounting scandal that helped bring the corporation
to the brink of bankruptcy. After only three months at the helm of the
nation’s largest maker of auto components, Miller announced his
corporate-makeover plan: declare bankruptcy, slash the wages of blue-collar
workers by two-thirds, end health care for retirees, and move more of
Delphi’s work offshore. Everyone must sacrifice, he sternly told
workers. Everyone? Not those at the top. To the contrary, the
day before announcing his plan, Miller quietly set up a $110 million bonus
package for the 21 top executives working under him. When exposed, this gob of greed caused such uproar
that Miller had to rush out and announce that, well, gosh, he and the other
execs now wanted to share the workers’ pain, agreeing to take cuts in
salary of 10 to 20 percent. Miller also said that he was cutting his own
pay to $1 a year. This reborn working-class hero then appealed to the
workers’ sympathy with this sob story: “I can be fired tomorrow
with no severance, no pension, no bonus, not even a ticket home.”
Before we all join Miller in a chorus of
“Solidarity Forever,” let’s note that those 21 highly
paid executives are still in line for those bonuses, and, oh, Miller forgot
to mention that he is sitting on a $3 million signing bonus he got when he
joined Delphi six months ago. As one worker put it after seeing the whole Delphi
mess and Miller’s filmflam: “You feel like throwing up.”
This article appears in Jan 5-11, 2006.
