Have you heard the one about how Harley-Davidson made big profits by firing more than a fifth of its work force?
No? Well, how about this one: The New York Times is reporting today that the same Harley-Davidson has forced its manufacturing employees to sign a contract that freezes their wages for most of the next seven years. How do you force unionized workers to accept such a contract, you ask? Why, you threaten to move their jobs elsewhere if they don’t, effectively leveraging the misery caused by the worst recession in 80 years. Obviously!
It’s not “mean-spirited”, though, says Matthew Levatich, the president of Harley-Davidson. “We have to retool if we want to survive. We should have started doing this, in small steps, 20 years ago.”
What Mr. Levatich doesn’t mention, of course, is that the decrease in demand for motorcycles, which is so disastrous for Harley-Davidson’s workers, doesn’t seem to be affecting the company’s executives in quite the same way. In fact, in 2009, Keith E. Wandell, the CEO of Harley-Davidson, received more than $6 million in compensation. By comparison, in 2006, then-CEO James L. Ziemer received around $4 million in compensation.
Call me a socialist, but it seems like an odd sort of economic system in which the biggest share of the risk is borne by the people who can not only least afford it, but who also inevitably receive the smallest share of the rewards.
Welcome to the new normal?
