MISSING THE POINT WITH AIG

Who among us is worth a multi-million dollar bonus? Even the justifiable public anger seems to have its face turned in the wrong direction. And shameless greed, while accurate to a large degree, still misses the moral target.

No one is talking here of robbing multi-millionaire Peter, who earned it, to pay street bum Paul, who did no work.

No one is talking here of equal pay for all work, regardless of effort.

No, what we have here is a system so out of whack, so filled with individual greed, so focused on personal gain even at the expense of the hand that feeds you that its workers can no longer distinguish right from wrong; because "that's how the system works."

Or currently, doesn't work. Contrary to common wisdom, it is not the presence of taxpayer dollars which makes this system and its minions wrong. It is just plain, old fashioned wrong.

I am tempted to remind one and all of every time management said during contract negotiations that they could not pay a living wage, provide insurance or allow sick leave because to do so would bankrupt the company. But the current company robbery makes unions look like wimps.

The more potent question we all should be asking is "what is work worth"?

All too often this discussion devolves into comparisons of doctors, daycare, teachers, emergency services - those who directly enhance or save lives versus sales, tradesmen, factory workers, municipal workers - those who keep our lives clean and filled with the material things we both need and want. (My vote goes to Mothers for the highest paid job on earth.)

Such a false premise for dialog can only lead down dead end paths. And one such dead end path is the belief of an individual employee that doing his or her job well should be monetarily rewarded beyond the remuneration set for that job.

For example, what about all those AIG employees who did not receive a bonus? Are we to infer that they did not do their job? That they are about to be fired for failure to perform? Of course not. It is likely they received fair pay for the job they were expected to do and did well.

One irony with AIG is that even they agree that the people who received bonuses are not the only people who could have done the jobs for which bonuses were paid.

So...they did their jobs, probably quite well, and they got paid well for doing those jobs. But bonuses not tied to the well-being of the company for whom all this was supposedly done? Bonuses, based on a single year, not the long haul for the company, lead to a whole lot of freelance "I must get mine and the rest of the world be screwed" attitude.

Still, who are these people so bereft of a moral compass; so blind and deaf to the larger world in which they are a mere disposable piece? Are they a portend or a symptom of what we all have become?

And when will the United States build a country and an economy in which all are paid on how well you do your job and not on which job creates wealth for a select few.