Some news reports simply are too hard to fathom. You read (or hear) it once and, no matter how many times you reread it, your reaction each time is along the lines of "Huh? You've got to be kidding!"
This is one of those stories.
Hopefully, you remember what took place in the Gulf of Mexico last year around this time. An oil rig owned by British Petroleum and operated by Transocean exploded killing 11 people. It took over 3 months to cap the well and, in the meantime, killed untold numbers of other creatures, cripple the area ecosystem, shut down commercial fishing in a large area of the Gulf, threw tens of thousands of people out of work, severely impacted tourism and sickened a good number of the people hired to clean it up.
All in all, it was a bad deal every way around.
So, how did Transocean respond to this year to forget? It awarded its top executives big bonuses "for its "best year" for safety!!!"
That's not a misprint. The bonuses were for S-A-F-E-T-Y.
According to the BBC, a company report indicated that Transocean "exceeded internal safety targets."
Two observations quickly come to mind. First, how low must those targets have been to exceed them? Second, if this was their best safety year ever, I would hate to think what their worst year was like!
This example offers yet another illustration of how out of touch most of the corporate world is. Financial institutions torpedo the economy, get bailed out by taxpayers and then award their execs big bonuses. Here we have a corporation that was partly responsible for the costliest environmental disaster in US history and they consider it a great safety year.
What is wrong with these people? Do they have no conscience whatsoever?
This is one of those stories.
Hopefully, you remember what took place in the Gulf of Mexico last year around this time. An oil rig owned by British Petroleum and operated by Transocean exploded killing 11 people. It took over 3 months to cap the well and, in the meantime, killed untold numbers of other creatures, cripple the area ecosystem, shut down commercial fishing in a large area of the Gulf, threw tens of thousands of people out of work, severely impacted tourism and sickened a good number of the people hired to clean it up.
All in all, it was a bad deal every way around.
So, how did Transocean respond to this year to forget? It awarded its top executives big bonuses "for its "best year" for safety!!!"
That's not a misprint. The bonuses were for S-A-F-E-T-Y.
According to the BBC, a company report indicated that Transocean "exceeded internal safety targets."
Two observations quickly come to mind. First, how low must those targets have been to exceed them? Second, if this was their best safety year ever, I would hate to think what their worst year was like!
This example offers yet another illustration of how out of touch most of the corporate world is. Financial institutions torpedo the economy, get bailed out by taxpayers and then award their execs big bonuses. Here we have a corporation that was partly responsible for the costliest environmental disaster in US history and they consider it a great safety year.
What is wrong with these people? Do they have no conscience whatsoever?
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