The Hightower Report

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SHOULD BOSSES BECOME CZARS?

How far would you let a boss push you? Maybe your boss keeps refusing to raise your pay and also cuts back on your health care. Still, jobs are short these days, and wages everywhere are low – so you stick it out. But what if the boss then has surveillance cameras put in to keep an eye on you at work, and also requires drug testing on the job? This invasion of your privacy angers you, but you still need the job, so you shrug it off.

But, next the boss wants to follow you out of the workplace and control what you do on your own time. If you do things after hours that do not conform to your boss' own particular beliefs, you're fired. Would you put up with that?

Believe it or not, more and more bosses are insisting that they have the right to monitor and regulate the activities of employees off the job, even perfectly legal activities. Howard Weyers is one such boss. He's honcho of Weyco, an insurance management corporation in Michigan. Howard doesn't like smokers, so he has instituted an anti-smoking policy.

Fine … except that Weyers' policy outlaws smoking off the job as well as on. He has imposed random, mandatory breathalyzer tests on his 200 employees. Fail once – and you're fired. "You work for me," Weyer says, "this is what I expect. You don't like it? Go someplace else." For Howard, a former football coach, it's a matter of making people better, more virtuous even. He says he used to hone his football players "mentally and physically" – and, he says, "I think that's what we need to do in the workplace."

Excuse me, Howard, but who elected you our nanny? If he can be the no-smoking dictator, other bosses can dictate that employees can't have a beer after work, must go to a particular kind of church on Sunday, or can't have Democratic bumper stickers on their cars.

To fight back, call the National Workrights Institute: 609/683-0313.

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THE SEC SURRENDERS

In 2002, America's corporate barons were on the lam, fleeing the wrath of a public that was outraged by the raw ugliness of CEO greed, which had suddenly erupted out of Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, and so many others.

You might recall that George W, feeling the political heat, loudly denounced the greed back then. To show his seriousness, Bush installed a new sheriff at the Securities and Exchange Commission, the agency in charge of protecting shareholders and the larger public from these out-of-control corporate chieftains. But 2½ years later, the CEOs are no longer running away – instead, they're running the SEC.

Signaling that the flag of reform has now been officially struck from the agency and replaced by the flags of the corporations it is charged with overseeing, the SEC recently capitulated on one of its key reforms. You and I would consider this a very mild – even meek – reform. It would've required that the boards of directors that supposedly serve as a check on CEO actions not be entirely chosen by CEOs. Instead, in board elections, large shareholders would be allowed to put forth their own independent nominees for a couple of board seats.

Good grief, shouted the CEOs in unison: The Bolsheviks are coming! Democracy, you see, is an idea that is abhorrent to corporate barons – and they mounted a massive lobbying campaign with Bush and Congress to get the SEC to stop this communistic encroachment on their totalitarian rule. Sure enough, in February, the SEC officials meekly ruled that this proposed reform had become "stale" with the passage of time, so they dropped it.

What we have here is a victory of corporate political money over the people's continuing outrage at CEO greed. Last year, Bush, flush with campaign cash from CEOs, joined their lobbying effort against shareholder democracy. And John Kerry, also immersed in CEO money, simply refused to raise the hot issue of corporate corruption – so reform became a political orphan, and now it's been killed.