Shareholders reject Stanley Black & Decker pay packages

[ProSense]

Shareholders reject Stanley Black & Decker pay packages

Baltimore Business Journal - by Gary Haber, Staff

Shareholders of Stanley Black & Decker Inc. have given a thumbs down to pay packages for the company’s top five executives, including a $28.2 million package for its executive chairman, former Black & Decker CEO Nolan D. Archibald.

Shareholders, in a nonbinding vote, also rejected $32.7 million in compensation for CEO John F. Lundgren, as well as pay packages for three other top executives of the New Britain, Conn., tool giant, the company said in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing.

The vote represents one of the first times shareholders of a company have turned down pay packages for a company’s top leaders since the Dodd-Frank financial reforms gave shareholders of publicly traded firms an advisory “say on pay.”

The vote is merely a recommendation, however, meaning a company’s board of directors does not have to abide by it. Stanley did not say in the filing whether it plans to follow the shareholder recommendation.

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Labor Puts Executive Pay in the Spotlight

[LiberalFighter]

1. I will never understand why any of them should get more than a couple of million.

[Squeech]

3. I've been thinking about this too.

The Reagan administration let it be known that they weren't going to prosecute antitrust violations, thereby opening the floodgates for unprecedented merger and acquisition activity. Initially the goal was just industry consolidation and cartelization, but soon enough companies would gobble up other companies just because they had money in the bank or a decent cash flow (since the acquiring companies floated absurd amounts of debt on these deals, and at some point had to start thinking about paying that money back). So companies that didn't want to be devoured had to contrive to "lose" their money-- and it turned out that the managers had a remarkably convenient suggestion: "Pay it to us!" So that's one of the reasons executive pay ramped up so ridiculously, starting in the '80s.

Now, of course, our Galtian overlords have just gotten addicted to the feeling of swimming in the Scrooge McDuck swimming pool bank vaults.

[dkf]

2. K&R

[Keith Bee]

4. +1