Carly Fiorina: Job-Killer Extraordinaire
By Steve Smith
Just when you think former CEO and known job-killer Carly Fiorina has retreated from public life for good, she somehow ends up back in the spotlight.
Yesterday, Ted Cruz, who has little chance of becoming his party’s nominee, made the bizarre decision to name Carly his running mate. Might be getting ahead of yourself a little there Teddy.
But we’ll play along. Let’s assume this is a political ploy to curry favor among California voters in the upcoming June primary. Will it work? Probably not.
Even Republicans are aware of Carly’s job-slashing record in California. Let’s just say Carly is the poster child for pretty much everything wrong with today’s corporate culture from sheltering profits overseas to evade taxes to slashing jobs and justifying it by calling it something like “smartsourcing” (yes, she actually said that).
So if you don’t remember Carly’s record from her failed Senate bid in California in 2010, here’s a quick primer.
Three things you need to know about Carly Fiorina’s job-killing record:
As 30,000 HP employees lost their jobs and the company’s stock value plummeted, Fiorina was compensated with more than $108 million, including salary, bonuses, and stock options, and she scored a $21.6 million golden parachute when she was fired.
Fiorina engineered a merger with Compaq that has been described as “a total flop”, and a “disaster”, and strong-armed reluctant investors into approving the merger, leading to a $750,000 SEC fine for a key investor and partner. She also got caught up in a scandal for selling HP products to Iran, sidestepping the trade ban with that country. During the six years Fiorina served as CEO, HP stock plummeted 60 percent, from $52 per share to $21 per share.
Fiorina boasts about shipping tens of thousands of U.S. jobs overseas, and says she would do it again.
Fiorina slashed more than 30,000 jobs at HP, many of which were outsourced to other countries – a practice she calls “right-shoring.” She says that one of her regrets was not firing more people more quickly. In fact, when asked if she would lay off 10,000 more workers if she was still CEO of HP, she responded with no hesitation, “Of course.”
Carly Fiorina got rich while her company tanked and her workers lost their jobs.
As 30,000 HP employees lost their jobs and the company’s stock value plummeted, Fiorina was compensated with more than $108 million, including salary, bonuses, and stock options, and she scored a $21.6 million golden parachute when she was fired. That doesn’t include the two corporate jets that she acquired, which cost $1 million per year to operate.
So there you have it. Not likely to make her or Ted Cruz many friends in the California primary. Or anywhere else for that matter.
