Have You Met Us?

The question of how far out of touch the average CEO is from his or her front-line personnel isn’t exactly a new one; people have been talking about this since the early days of the Industrial Revolution – which is to say, for as long as there have been CEOs or large corporations for them to be CEO of. Not surprisingly, this has become a more contentious topic as the gap in salary between senior management and line personnel has widened. In the days when the CEO made a dozen times what a line supervisor took home, and perhaps 30 times what the lowest-level worker made, it might have seemed reasonable to assume that the employees in question had at least some common frame of reference, but with CEO salaries ranging as high as thousands of times what the workers make it has become hard to imagine why an executive being paid hundreds of millions a year would know anything about the lives of minimum-wage employees. None of which makes the CEO of CKE Restaurants saying that his company’s fast food managers prefer “stature” to overtime pay any less fatuous, of course…

If you missed it you can pick up the story of HuffingtonPost, but the basic facts are clear enough. Andy Puzder, the CEO of the company that owns the Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr. chains not only said it, but took to the Op-Ed page of the Wall Street Journal to proclaim that the Obama Administration’s efforts to raise the salary threshold above which supervisory personnel can be declared “Exempt” and forced to work overtime for no additional compensation would constitute “demoting entry-level managers to glorified crew members by replacing their incentive to get results with an incentive to log more hours.” He then goes on to say that “What they lose in overtime pay they gain in the stature and sense of accomplishment that comes from being a salaried manager.” It’s enough to make you question whether Mr. Puzder has ever served as a supervisor in a fast-food operation, and if so, on what planet that restaurant was located…

Most of the people who work minimum-wage jobs in America are not doing so for the sense of personal achievement and/or self-sufficiency to be had by being gainfully employed; they’re doing so in order to pay the rent, feed their family and avoid becoming homeless. By the same token, most first-line supervisors are not performing their basic management responsibilities because of stature or a sense of accomplishment; they’re doing it because of (marginally) better working conditions and (slightly) higher pay. In fact, it’s not at all uncommon for senior hourly personnel to refuse promotion because it would result in an effectively lower salary – especially in situations where their hourly position is protected by a collective bargaining agreement and the lowest tier of management is not. Or, perhaps more to the point, when the actual work duties are almost identical but the position requires longer hours at lower pay and no overtime – which is commonly the case in both retail and food service…

Now, I’m not suggesting that Mr. Puzder doesn’t feel a sense of accomplishment and enjoy his stature as CEO; with a salary listed at $4.48 million and thousands of people who must comply with his orders or risk immediate termination. I’m not even suggesting that Mr. Puzder doesn’t work long hours himself; I’m quite sure that being the CEO of a company that size does require a fair number of long working days. But I have worked as the first-level supervisor in both of those industries, and I can tell you that there is all of the difference in the world between working in a beautiful, clean executive office where your largest hazard is a paper cut and working in a hot, greasy fast-food kitchen where your biggest hazards are third-degree burns from boiling oil and being shot to death in an armed robbery. Especially when the pay differential is between $2,153.84 per hour for the CEO and $9.81 per hour for the fast-food supervisor…

Without additional research I can’t be certain if Mr. Puzder was ever a fast-food restaurant employee or not. But I’d really like to ask him if he has ever met any…