In Bankruptcy, Reader’s Digest CEO, CFO Get Sweet Financial Packages

It is good to be a CEO. My severance package wasn't anything like that - and I actually made money for my company.

Here's another example of someone being compensated far in excess of his or her value to a company. What does Mary Berner produce? What does Tom Williams create? The Reader's Digest is essentially a composite of condensed articles or stories written by talented, imaginative people. Is being the collector of that real talent something for which you should pay your CEO a million and a half bucks a year?

Is this the typical or standard approach for CEO's and CFO's when a pre-packaged Chapter 11 takes place? Did the senior executives, particularly the CEO and CFO at Source Interlink Media accrue similar base salaries and payouts when they filed their pre-packaged Chapter 11?

RDA emplyees face loss of insurance, pensions, jobs, etc. while the people who are responsible for leveraging it to the point of unprofitability continue to thrive. I suspect that Lila and DeWitt Wallace (RDA founders)are rolling over in their graves at this sad turn of events.

What a joke. Mary B's finacier brother (Ripplewood) giftwrapped RD and handed it it to his sister. So she runs it into . . . or at the very least she was at the helm when it ran aground during the ad spending storm. The ship is taking on water. she provides herself with a gold plated lifeboat and oh. by the way brother's investment has turned to crap. Thanks, sis!

Mary gets a huge severance, but employees recently laid-off were told their severance will stop once the courts approve the bankruptcy. Mary Berner mentions how she brought the debt down.....Yes, buy not paying severance to loyal employees. She shold be very proud of herself.

Readers Digest outsourced more than 80% of their IT and Web functions to the Indian vendor, HCL. So they are saving 350 million dollars and as of today, they do not need to pay out severance to those workers. Meanwhile, top executives receive huge pay raises for destroying an iconic American company. Sad day for America, sad day for 100's of outsourced workers, and a sad day for the 100's more employees still at Readers Digest who are all on salary freezes!

This is clearly disgusting! After freezing salaries, forcing employees to take unpaid leave days and not giving bonuses, executives cash up! This will clearly make a big dent it employees' trust

Mary Berner, like so many other corporate executives in modern America, is a classic example of executive "Do as I say, not as I do" in action. As she told employees of The Reader's Digest Association, Inc., the day before about 8 percent of them were laid off, "we need to stay on track to meet our financial commitments to our shareholders and lenders who entrusted their money to backing RDA in expectation that RDA would perform. Any analysis of our current situation must start with the understanding that we have no choice (last two words underlined in original) but to keep our financial commitments, and work from there." With RDA's filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, so much for keeping financial commitments. Berner's latest antics, as detailed in Jason Fell's article above and in previous comments regarding it, are merely the latest in her long series of arrogant, out-of-touch insults against the hardworking employees who built RDA. Her laying off about 280 employees, including many top performers whose dedication and sacrifices built RDA far more than any of her and Ripplewood's actions ever will, her freezing (actually, with furloughs, cutting) employee salaries (with no bonuses for employees this year, of course), her ending company matches to RDA's 401(k) plan, and her cutting back on severance for employees laid off after a specified future date are bad enough. But Her Bernerness, Queen Mary, has now outdone even herself. As she told her "subjects" in January, "you will see that our cost-reduction moves are intended to contribute relief to the company's finances. Let me be clear: these changes will affect everyone in the company including Executive Committee members, me, and all other employees." Bad grammar in that last sentence aside (she'd benefit from a good copy editor), her latest, shamelessly self-serving "changes" to her own salary and severance package, after pleading poverty to the very people whose hard work has made her success possible, show the *real* Mary Berner "mentality." She has thus forfeited any last claim she might have had to credibility from any of us, not to mention the loyalty and commitment of RDA's employees. She thus now deserves as much loyalty and consideration from them--and from all of us--as she has shown them and to basic principles of fairness and equity: none. I, for one, will do all I can to make sure that I never purchase or use another RDA product, at least as long as Berner is in charge there. (That might not be the case for much longer.) What Berner truly deserves--for example, to be required to pay back most if not all of her outlandish $9.2 million compensation in fiscal year 2008 so it can be redistributed to those who really deserve such a reward, the "ordinary" RDA employees who have lost pay and even jobs--might be farfetched at best under current law, but that *would* be a start toward some semblance of justice here. More seriously, however, might there be any way that RDA employees, creditors, and others can ask the bankruptcy court to "claw back" Berner's recent self-serving raise and severance "enhancement" as thorougly outrageous and abusive, both of which they truly are? It is long past time that working Americans, including RDA employees and their supporters, stand up as one to the likes of Berner and the abuses she and her ilk have pulled on employees and most everyone else. Berner and others who engage in what now sadly passes as "typical corporate behavior" must be held, to use one of her pet words, "Accountable"--and put in her place by any lawful means necessary. Another good place to start restoring some sense of accountability, balance, and fairness would be for RDA employees, publishing employees generally, and white-collar workers everywhere in America to reread their American history and do as their forebears facing employer abuses did--form and bargain collectively for better treatment through no-nonsense, strong labor unions.

Mary Berner's hypocrisy in requiring steep sacrifices--including the jobs of some 280 of the hardworking "ordinary" employees who built RDA far more than she and her Ripplewood "masters of the universe" friends ever did or will--of her "subjects" aside, might it be possible for RDA employees, creditors, and concerned others to ask the bankruptcy court to "claw back" her recent and shamelessly self-serving salary and severance "enhancements"? It is long past time that working people and their allies put and keep Her Bernerness and her ilk in their proper place (or, to use one of Berner's pet phrases, held Accountable) by *any* lawful means necessary, including, yes, strong, no-nonsense unions in publishing and in white-collar America generally.

this is outrageous. berner was fully responsible for the due diligence and then marched into RDA to tell the company how "she does" it better. She is a poor leader, with poor track record and a person that drains all thouse in her sphere.