Another day, another golf outing after layoffs

Today's ridiculous corporate piracy story comes out of Gannett Newspapers where the president is playing in a charity golf tournament on the company dime. Of course this comes after the company laid off 3,000 workers over Christmas. Naturally the same golfer released a phony sympathy memo at the same time going a little something like this :

"As all of you are painfully aware, the fiscal crisis is deepening and the economy is getting worse. Gannett’s revenues continue to be severely impacted by this downturn, and our local operations are suffering. While we are doing our best to reduce all non staff-related expenses, I am sorry to report that we must do another round of layoffs across our division.

Ahh, I wonder how many jobs that golf trip cost. Naturally, after the AIG scandalous parties and the pay to the CEO of Lehman Brothers nothing surprises me these days. Using the CEO pay database and comparison tool, I saw that the compensation for the CEO of Gannett was 314 times that of someone making an entry level salary of $42,000. To put it another way, it would take an entry level worker 314 years, or 4 lifetimes to make as much as the CEO makes in a single year. I guess I better work on that reincarnation gig if I hope to be able to keep up.