CEOs who earn their keep... and those who don't

Executive pay has become an issue that increasingly dominates political discourse, corporate boardrooms and annual shareholder meetings.

Boards of directors say they pay executives for performance, tying benchmarks such as earnings to both short-term incentives (usually cash bonuses) and long-term incentives (like stock and option awards).

Shareholders don’t always buy it. About 3 percent of the Russell 3000 companies — an index that measures the performance of the largest 3,000 publicly held U.S. companies based on total market capitalization — failed to win approval of advisory “say on pay” votes both this year and last year, said Joe Kager, managing consultant at The Poe Group Inc. in Tampa. “The message shareholders are sending is there is misalignment of pay for performance,” Kager said.

Tampa Bay Business Journal
May 27, 2016, 6:00am EDT
Margie Manning and Chris Erickson

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Defining and Delimiting the Exemptions for Executive, Administrative, Professional, Outside Sales and Computer Employees under the Fair Labor Standards Act

On May 18, 2016, President Obama and Secretary Perez announced the publication of the Department of Labor’s final rule updating the overtime regulations, which will automatically extend overtime pay protections to over 4 million workers within the first year of implementation. This long-awaited update will result in a meaningful boost to many workers’ wallets, and will go a long way toward realizing President Obama’s commitment to ensuring every worker is compensated fairly for their hard work.

U.S. Department of Labor, Wage and Hour Division (WHD), Final Rule: Overtime

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Opinion: Tesla’s Elon Musk is doing for executive compensation what he did for electric cars

It’s hard to think of a move that a corporation could make that should win the simultaneous applause of investors, Bernie Sanders and the ghost of neoconservative thinker Irving Kristol, whose “Two Cheers for Capitalism” was as aware of the limits of free enterprise as a modern right-winger can be.

But Tesla Motors Inc.’s TSLA, +1.91% compensation plan for CEO Elon Musk is a good one for the company’s shareholders and workers. The Musk That Roars stands to get $1.6 billion worth of stock options by 2022. But the plan so brilliantly balances Musk’s incentives to do well and do good that it’s Ben & Jerry’s Vermont-style corporate governance — with zeroes on top.

MarketWatch, Published: Apr 25, 2016 9:52 a.m. ET By TIM MULLANEY

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EMC Vs. Dell Top Executive Compensation: How Do They Compare?

Dell and EMC executives talk a lot about how well the two companies will fit together once their proposed merger is finalized, but there is one area where things don't really line up: executive pay.

EMC's top executives make vastly more than privately held Dell's. Being publicly traded makes a big difference -- EMC execs get millions in stock awards as part of their pay. The company detailed the 2015 pay packages of top executives recently in its annual proxy filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

CRN, byMatt Brownon April 18, 2016, 3:17 pm

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Investors Lose When Executive Compensation Goes Awry

When executive compensation incentives are not aligned with creating shareholder value, you risk having executives whose goals are not aligned with investors. The consequences of such misalignment are behavior like what we have seen with Valeant Pharmaceuticals (VRX), whose stock is down 68% year-to-date, and whose internal controls may get a qualified opinion by their auditor. Valeant is not the only company with misaligned executive incentives. There are many others.

Forbes, APR 15, 2016 @ 02:57 PM
David Trainer, Contributor
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Dodd-Frank and Executive Compensation – Part 1: Status Update

It’s been over five years since the signing of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Act (“Dodd-Frank”) and we are still waiting for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to finalize rules on several provisions related to executive compensation. Below is a summary of the current landscape of Dodd-Frank as it relates to key executive compensation provisions. Over the coming months, we will be posting a series of blog posts addressing some of the nuances of these provisions. 

Written by Alexander K. Song

AKSong@mintz.com

212.692.6237

See more at: http://www.natlawreview.com/article/dodd-frank-and-executive-compensation-part-1-status-update#sthash.FzWDafyu.dpuf