Dick Grasso's $240K "secretary"

There have been articles in the NY Times and WSJ about how Dick Grasso's secretary was paid $240,000/year. The purpose of this type of reporting is to arouse anger in the masses. I just love this reponse by strategist:

Is there any wonder why so many people hate the uber-criminal-rich and their cohorts? I cannot f'ing believe Grasso paid the assistant that much cash. I honestly think there is something going on behind the story and once the media gets some balls, we'll all know the truth behind the outrageous sum of money.

That's exactly the kind of reaction the newspaper reporters were hoping for. But I'm not terribly surprised that Grasso's executive assistant was making that much money. Grasso himself was making about $25 million/year,  so his assistant was making only 1/100th of his pay.

I also notice that the papers are trying to demean the job by calling her a "secretary." The proper politically correct term these days is "executive assistant." It's not an especially well kept secret that the CEO's executive assistant is one of the best compensated employees at most companies. It's true at my company where my assistant makes six figures. But we try to keep this a secret because we don't want the regular employees to be jealous and resentful.

As the most important and best compensated employee of the company, the CEO needs a highly qualified assistant to make his job more efficient. If you want to be effective as a CEO you need the best assistant you can find.

My assistant screens my phone calls and emails, proofreads a lot of what I write, writes letters, emails, prepares Powerpoint slides, keeps my schedule, and cheerfully brings me coffee and picks up my clothes from the dry cleaners. The executive assistant needs to have excellent writing skills and computer skills. Her phone manner needs to be impeccable because she takes phone calls from the company's most important customers.

Grasso's assistant was a law school graduate. If she was working as a lawyer and making $240,00/year, no one would think anything was unusual, but because she was using her skills to be an assistant to a top executive, which is a job at least as important to our economy as a lawyer (we probably have around a million lawyers in the U.S.), her salary is criticized.

Professor Bainbridge suspects (as does Tom) that the whole Grasso investigation is just about Eliot Spitzer padding his resume to run for governor of NY. I agree that Spitzer's career ambitions cast a dark cloud upon his publicity seeking investigations.

Comments

[David Foster]

I've seen companies where the only completely sane individual in the entire corporation, as far as I could tell, was the CEO's executive assistant.

I think it was not well appreciated how much "secretaries" contributed to the smooth running of many organizations, and the great reduction in the numbers of these jobs has added to unnecessary organizational chaos.

In the specific case: the compensation received by Grasso and his exec assistant would be one thing in a a normal, competitive business, but I'm not sure the NYSE falls into that category.

[Michael Street]

Why is everyone shying away from the obvious? When a beatiful woman is serving your Japanese business partner tea with a big smile, you just made and extra few million upon closing the deal. Preferrably, this woman has a title like "JD," so that you can hide the truth - old rich men like to have young pretty women in bed and since they're so old, uncool, and out of touch with reality, the only way to get what they want is to pay for it. The other employees simply don't have what it takes to be that valuable to the boss. Capitalism.