Singling out CEOs as the culprits behind economic woes is nothing new, but the blame laid at heads of Jewish organizations by the Forward this week for not cutting their salaries while laying-off staff doesn’t have a correlation with the way the economics of these things really works. This is suggestive of a general problem with lay-personomics, whereby people who make lots of money to do their jobs seem to be hated for that reason alone, and those who make less are seen as entitled to a specific slice of CEOs’ pie.
The Forward gets it wrong on five points:
1) J-Org Jobs Aren’t Tzedakah, Nor an Entitlement
By suggesting in the first place that CEOs should be taking pay-cuts to keep laid-off staff around, the Forward seems to think that ensuring the college-educated, middle-class-or-better employees at J-orgs still have jobs is the business of what J-orgs do as part of their charitable mission. But the reason a J-org employee is employed is not to be doing good for that employee, but to ask that employee to do good for others.
