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When Hewlett-Packard’s Chief Executive Mark Hurd resigned last month he received something few regular workers see when they quit their jobs under a cloud: A massive payout. Turns out Hurd is far from the only top executive to be rewarded with a rich package despite a management performance that could be considered less than optimal — especially by rank-and-file workers. A new report concludes that chief executives of the 50 firms that have laid off the most workers since the onset of the economic crisis in 2008 took home 42 percent more pay in 2009 than their peers at other large U.S. companies.The report, from the Institute of Policy Studies, found that the 50 layoff leaders received $12 million on average in 2009, compared with an average compensation of $8.5 million for chief executives of companies in Standard & Poor's 500. Each of the 50 companies examined in the report laid off at least 3,000 workers between November 2008 and April 2010. “Our findings illustrate the great unfairness of the Great Recession,” said Sarah Anderson, lead author of the study, “CEO Pay and the Great Recession,” the latest in a series of annual “Executive Excess” reports published by the institute, a progressive think tank. “CEOs are squeezing workers to boost short-term profits and fatten their own paychecks.” Those CEOs include HP’s Hurd, who slashed 6,400 jobs in 2009 — a year when his compensation amounted to $24.2 million. Newsweek: When CEOs behave badly Hurd made headlines last month when he suddenly resigned after an investigation into a sexual harassment claim against him found he had falsified expense reports related to meetings with a female contractor. Despite the findings, he walked away with a severance package that reportedly could be worth more than $40 million. The report also highlights Johnson & Johnson’s William Weldon, who took home $25.6 million — more than three times the average CEO compensation for big U.S. companies — even as the health care giant was slashing 9,000 jobs and facing a massive drug recall scandal. Fred Hassan of drug pharmaceutical company Schering-Plough received a $33 million “golden parachute” when his firm merged with Merck in late 2009, the report said, even as Schering was laying off 16,000 workers. The report calculates that Hassan’s total compensation for 2009 of almost $50 million could have been used to cover the average cost of these workers’ jobless benefits for over 10 weeks. Overall, the Institute for Policy Studies calculates that the $598 million total compensation awarded to the top 50 CEO layoff leaders was enough to provide average unemployment benefits to 37,759 workers for an entire year, or nearly one month of benefits for each of the 531,363 workers their companies laid off. While the details of the report may seem shocking at first blush, it’s worth remembering that a public company’s chief executive has a fiduciary obligation to maximize value for the owners of a corporation — its shareholders. “This report is not quite as cynical as it seems,” said Dr. Andrew Ward, associate dean at the College of Business at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa.

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