I hope all of you who own Nike shares actually read the proxy statement and vote your shares accordingly. The proxy statement has some absolute gems in it. For example:
“The employee identified at the median of all NIKE employees (other than our CEO) was a retail store employee in Canada. The annual total compensation of the median employee was $37,410. The annual total compensation of our CEO, [JD], was $28,838,060. The estimated ratio of the annual total compensation of our CEO to the median annual total compensation of all other NIKE employees is 771 to 1.”
That’s right ladies and gentlemen. Nike’s CEO is 771x smarter and works 771x harder than the median Nike employee. Or something like that, I guess.
Disgusting. Absolutely, positively disgusting. If a CEO had been paid 771x the median employee compensation just a few decades ago, it would have been widely considered to be a moral and ethical outrage. Today however…not so much. Which is a sad commentary on the current state of American society, and how bald-faced excess and greed has become accepted and normalized.
We like to think politicians bear most of the responsibility for the fact that it’s a literal truth: the rich are getting richer, and the poor (and middle class) are getting poorer. But while our ‘bought and paid for’ politicians do bear a lot of responsibility for America’s ever-increasing income inequality, and the subsequent societal chaos it causes, America’s overpaid corporate executives also play a massive role in that problem. And WE don’t talk about it enough!
Nike’s overpaid executives like to talk about virtuous things, but just beneath the surface they are actually key contributors to one of the single biggest problems in America these days: rampant income inequality that creates an ever-expanding gulf between the “haves” and “have nots”.
Go anywhere in the world and wherever you find war, strife, violence, and general anger & anxiety, at the root of those problems you’ll find societies where a few people on the top have unimaginable wealth, and everyone else lives off the crumbs those oligarchs are charitable enough to drop behind them. America is heading ever more quickly in that direction and you have people like Nike’s CEO and its other overpaid executives to thank for it.
Think about that and vote your Nike shares wisely. Especially around matters of compensation.
There are some other great tidbits in the proxy too. For example, did you know JD and MP have limited PERSONAL use of Nike corporate jets? We’ve paid this CEO more than $115,000,000 over the last three years alone, and dude can’t be bothered to pay for his own damn air travel???
Jesus H. Christ. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. And while all of this is going on Nike bombards both employees and consumers with constant messages about how progressive and virtuous Nike is as a company. It’s as if Nike is doing it’s own version of the Wizard of Oz’s “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!” schtick.
You aren’t powerless here. Call out these types of injustice when you see them. And just because bad behavior has become normalized, that doesn’t mean YOU need to view it as an acceptable norm.
Start by pushing back when you vote your shares.