Read the Guardian article:
By way of background, who are the Orders involved in this challenge?
Sisters of Saint Joseph of Boston. Active in the fight against human trafficking, health care advocacy, poverty awareness, immigration issues.
Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur. A world-wide sisterhood working with refugees in London, street children in Nairobi, immigrant farm workers in Florida, AIDS orphans in Zimbabwe, and especially with women and children. Changing unjust structures through education.
Sisters of St. Francis of Philadelphia. Initiatives on corporate responsibility and responsible investment, environmental education, community-supported agriculture.
Benedictine Sisters of Mt. Angel. Shelter, support, and advocacy to migrant and area farmworkers and the homeless. Supporting ministries through the sale of their unique, premium Monastery Mustard.
You get the picture: a bunch of wingnuts who have perverted the Gospel into some kind of message about “social justice.” They probably studied Liberation Theology. (In fact, it is likely that some of them did. The nuns pictured on their websites seem to be from the Vatican II generation.)
No, I won’t get started on that now. Maybe some other post. For now, let’s look at the response by Goldman Sachs:
Shareholders already have access to the information necessary to understand and assess the compensation decisions made with respect to our senior executives, and the firm as a whole. Our board believes that the preparation of the requested report would be a distraction to our compensation committee and our board, would entail an unjustified cost to our firm and would not provide shareholders with any meaningful information.
The response says that the relevant information has already been made available to investors. In other words, stockholders (like these nuns) have access to reporting documents that detail the metrics by which major compensation decisions are made. Very likely this is true to some extent; there is enough information in the reports to roughly justify the company’s claim, which obviously provides no supporting detail.
The sisters are asking for something very different, however. Here is an excerpt from their request:
We request that the report include:
- An evaluation of whether our senior executive compensation packages (including, but not limited to, options, benefits, perks, loans and retirement agreements) are ‘excessive’ and should be modified.
- An exploration of how sizeable layoffs and the level of pay of our lowest paid workers impact senior executive pay.
- An analysis of the way in which fluctuations in revenues impact: a) the company’s compensation pool; b) the compensation of the company’s top 25 senior executives; and c) the company’s shareholders.
Note that these Orders are investors in Goldman Sachs, that is, they have money or capital on which they seek to make a profit. They are also, in varying degrees, all business people, engaged in running organizations to whose survival and success they are committed. As stockholders, they identify with the company and take responsibility for its actions: they speak of “our” executives and “our” lowest-paid workers. They are not out to destroy the system or the corporation. What are they after?
Humanities majors, out there, back me up. They are asking for a reflection on the character and implications of the company’s overall compensation policy. They are asking for cognizance of the relation between the salaries of top executives and the pay for workers at the lower end of the scale. In general, this is about consequences, connections, the big picture. Subtly, it is an attack on the tendency of business language and business thinking to tightly control the framework within which information, especially economic information, is interpreted.
The last point is particularly interesting: “An analysis of the way in which fluctuations in revenues impact: a) the company’s compensation pool; b) the compensation of the company’s top 25 senior executives; and c) the company’s shareholders.” Couched in language any executive will intuitively respond to, this plays on the underlying paradigm of much business thinking, the zero-sum game. Roughly translated, it says: In a period when overall revenues are drastically reduced, there is a correspondingly reduced “compensation pool” from which all employee salaries and benefits, as well as stockholder payouts, must be drawn. If senior executives are awarded stunningly large packages at such a time (the five top employees at Goldman Sachs received compensation totalling $69.5 million, according to The Guardian), this can only be at the expense both of the lesser-paid employees and of shareholders.
Do the math. The stockholders and the lesser-paid employees, in this view, are in the same boat. Liberation Theology indeed!
The surface similarity of the nuns’ language to the cautious, controlled language of the business world is deceptive, however. They see the world, and economics, and business, in fundamentally different ways.
I have always been fond of the type of older woman who evolves into more and more of a trouble-maker with age. There were several in my family like that, including my sister, and others among my current friends. I love the idea of a strong, mature woman ripening into a great, vernacular prophet, her voice strengthening, her colors sharpening, as the unimportant falls away and the central vision comes to dominate all else.
Go Sisters!
Excellent article on Liberation Theology by James Martin S.J.
