French President Emmanuel Macron has defined the 2021 compensation of the CEO of Stellantis, Carlos Tavares (19.15 million euros) “shocking” and “excessive”, adding his voice to a general protest about the manager’s salary. “We are talking about astronomical sums. We need to put a limit on this system and it could work if we act at the European level,” Macron said. “People – he continued – cannot have purchasing power difficulties and see these sums”. The French president then recalled how Stellantis has its council and governance in the Netherlands. “What we need to know how to do is, as we have done with minimum taxation and the fight against tax evasion, to convince our European partners to implement a reform that allows us to monitor, at a certain point, the remuneration of our managers”, he said. he. “Of course it’s shocking, it’s even more shocking when it’s the managers who put their company in trouble,” reacted other presidential candidate Marine Le Pen. In the evening Stellantis wanted to reiterate how 90% of Tavares’ salary is linked to results and that under his direction the group has gone from the crisis to “a position of leadership”.
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by Massimo Donelli
Giuseppe Melchiorre Sarto (1835-1914) walked, often barefoot, the eight kilometers which, in the province of Treviso, separate Riese from Castelfranco. It was the distance from home to school. And Giuseppe loved school very much. The second of ten children, a farmer father, a seamstress mother, soon knew the price of labor. So when, with the name of Pio X he became Pope, he indicated, among the four deadly sins that cry out for revenge in the sight of God, “Defrauding the worker of just wages”. Adriano Olivetti (1901-1960) in 1924 he started working for his father’s company. He was a brilliant chemical engineer. And he could have had a leading role. Instead, he wanted to start from the assembly line. Decisive experience. From then on, he spent his life trying to create a technologically advanced society, but one that was also supportive, participatory and just. Therefore, when he was told that Vittorio Valletta (1883-1967), number one Fiat, earned 12 times more than a worker, was scandalized: “No manager, not even the highest in rank, must earn more than ten times the amount of the minimum wage”. Olivetti could never have imagined that Sergio Marchionne (1952-2018), homologous from Valletta, would have come to collect not 12 but 2,000 times the wages of an FCA worker (Fiat Chrysler Automobiles). And least of all he could have thought that Stellantis, of which FCA is now a part, would pay the CEO, Carlos Tavares 63, Portuguese, with 19.15 million euros a year, or 52,054 euros a day.
Isolated cases? Stephen Easterbrook , 54, as CEO of McDonald’s earned $ 21.7 million in 2018, 2,124 times the average annual salary of his employees. When they kicked him out in 2019 over a corporate flirtation, he walked away with a $ 42 million settlement. Plus another 23.8 in shares. Nothing, however, compared to Bob Iger , 71, a former number one Disney, who came to collect (in 2018), 65.6 million dollars and to derive 98 from the sale of shares that had been allotted to him. Stories from other worlds. The ethical one of Pius X and Adriano Olivetti. The exaggerated one of top managers. It is true that in Italy we are not at American levels. But we don’t even joke around here. Carlo Cimbri 56, chief executive officer and general manager of Unipol, earned € 7.917 million in 2018. Luigi Gubitosi , 60 years old, leaving Tim’s leadership six months ago, after less than three years, took a payment of 6.9 million euros. And Giovanni Castellucci , 62, former CEO of Atlantia (Autostrade), the Morandi Bridge collapsed and left with 13 million euros. Sure always… crumbs in the face of the liquidation of Cesare Romiti (1923-2020), who after 24 years at the top of Fiat, was accompanied to the door, in 1998, with the equivalent in lire of 150 million euros.
From all this emerges, clearly, a sort of social schizophrenia. Today, in fact, if you enter the company as a simple employee, you discover that the social lift is broken: a thousand euros a month and running. Career? But go! Dear grace, you have the place … If, on the other hand, you get there as a manager, the other elevator, that of the managers, runs straight up to the highest (salary) floors. How long can you go on like this? “The desire to enrich oneself at any cost, the passion for business, the greed for earnings, the pursuit of well-being and material enjoyments are the most common passions in this society. They spread easily in all classes, penetrating up to those who they had hitherto been more alien to them, and they will soon weaken and degrade the whole nation if nothing stops them “. So he thought it Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859), French aristocrat and great social analyst. At a guess, he caught us …