Boztopia.com

One of the important truths that Western culture (America in particular) is only now coming to grips with is the fact that corporations exert considerable force over our everyday lives, even more than governments do in many ways. In the private sector, you’re completely at the mercy of whatever the business wants, and the massive damage done to both the unions and the manufacturing base means that many people are forced to take ever-more-humiliating jobs in ever-crappier service-sector environments just to survive. While the workers have to endure low pay, zero benefits, terrible work conditions, and no chance for advancement, the management uses their efforts to reap large profits for itself–often shirking not only the workers and the customers, but the stockholders too.

A perfect example of this was recently brought to my attention–the struggle between workers for the Atria assisted living facilities, and Bruce Wasserstein, CEO of Lazard Capital Markets, who owns through affiliates the entire Atria chain.

Assisted living facilities aren’t quite the same as nursing homes–they can vary wildly in terms of cost, activities offered, treatments, etc. I’ve been mulling over this for some time now, as my parents are in their 70s. While both are incredibly spry and vigorous for their age, the time may come when they may not be able to look after themselves, and I may have to consider giving them a place of relative comfort and dignity to enjoy their remaining years.

Naturally, I’d want whichever place I chose to offer good quality of life for them, and also good treatment for their workers–if you treat your workers well and pay them a decent wage, you’ll get good returns and good service. So you’d think, but apparently Atria disagrees:

“In my situation I have had such a hard time getting Atria to do what my 88-year-old mother needs,” she claimed. “The facility management is unresponsive and too often it seems they are interested in only making money. The facilities are too short-staffed. Many of these residents suffer from disorientation and dementia.”

Imagine finding out that your elderly parents were being mistreated or neglected in places like these, and that their caregivers and workers were being paid crap wages and forced to work a three-person workload. You’d think that a heavyweight investment fund like Lazard would pay more attention when their customers were demanding better treatment, right? Wrong again:

The announcement yesterday by Lazard Ltd. that Bruce Wasserstein, CEO of Lazard Ltd. and a principal of the Lazard group of companies, has signed a new contract worth more than $100 million and will be paid more than $41 million for 2007 is leaving low-wage workers in shock at Lazard-affiliated Atria Senior Living.

Tone-deaf to the growing concerns of working Americans about their financial security and the state of the economy, Lazard Ltd. is showering Wasserstein with a CEO pay package worth approximately 13 percent of Lazard Ltd.’s entire 2007 profit. “How can they give this guy so much money?” said Steve Lacey, a maintenance worker at Lazard’s Atria Shaker in Albany, New York. “I’ve never had a weekend off in 10 years, and I just got my first bonus ever.”

It gets better–not only is over ten percent of the company’s profit going to reward the CEO’s pay package, but Wasserstein uses the Byzantine structures of Wall Street to claim that Atria is only “affiliated” with Lazard, and thus not his responsibility to do anything about. And the kicker? Not only are Atria’s workers criminally underpaid and the seniors living there often criminally mistreated, but the shareholders have suffered seriously criminal losses to boot:

Even though merger advisory firm Lazard’s first-quarter earnings plummeted 71.0% and its shares lost 35.8% of their value in the last year, shareholders voted at the annual shareholder conference on Tuesday to boost chief executive Bruce Wasserstein’s compensation package up to $89.6 million a year.

In 2007, Wall Street deal-maker Wasserstein’s made himself a deal with a paycheck of a reported $41 million, more than a quarter of the firm’s full-year profit. Yet the company reported on Tuesday that investment losses are soaring and mergers are declining.

Sounds like another fine case of “privatize the profits, socialize the risk” to me–a blatant example of how “gotcha capitalism” has corrupted America’s social contract. But this isn’t some intangible, abstract issue that involves people you may never meet or hear about. This could be your parents, your relatives, your friends, and someday even you.

Over the next two weeks, I’ll be chronicling this issue and how it ties into the larger scheme of the hollowing out of America’s economic core–and what people are doing to fight back. Because when it’s the healthy care of our senior citizens at stake, a weekend off for their caregivers isn’t too much to ask.

This post was sponsored in part by The Campaign To Improve Assisted Living.