Business Pomposity Strikes Again

This is how her boss once described Martha Connelly’s secretarial job:

Fast-paced, high-volume office downtown needs industrious, bright individual who likes challenges, learns quickly and is willing to work overtime when necessary.

Applicant must be a self-starter and a team player who gets along well with others, has excellent organizational skills and displays a pleasant attitude toward work.

Professional phone presence and dress a must. Types 90+ WPM. Outstanding mathematical, spelling and critical-thinking skills required, as well as knowledge of, or ability to learn, several word-processing programs.

After three years, this is what Martha Connelly would add:

Orders and sets up coffee and pastries for the morning meeting.

Negotiates truces between warring factions in the office.

Offers refreshments and amusing, intelligent conversation when corporate clients come calling.

Oversees and coordinates her boss’s professional and personal schedule, especially where his day to take his daughter to ballet lessons is concerned.

Takes overflow calls from other departments.

Works overtime to help her boss finish projects because he doesn’t know how to type, doesn’t use the office computers and needs her aforementioned organizational, critical-thinking and spelling skills for his reports.

“He’s lost without me. It’s the classic secretary-boss thing, and my boss would be the first to admit it,” said Connelly.

“I think,” she added, laughing.

“Of course, one could argue that I’d be jobless without him. But seriously, half of what he turns in as his own accomplishments are really my work and he knows it.”

Anyone who has ever made a living as a secretary knows Connelly’s story is par for the course. And the truth is, Connelly hardly cared that she’s in the background while he basks in the glory.

Until she heard what computer-maker IBM is doing.

After announcing it has $10.5 billion in cash and posted record first-quarter earnings this year, IBM embarked on a top-to-bottom assessment of salary levels and came up with a plan that has America’s 3.6 million secretaries grumbling and growling around the facsimile machine.

The IBM plan calls for cutting the salaries of 120 executive secretaries, some by as much as 36 percent.

It doesn’t take an MBA from Harvard Business School to understand why companies posting profits almost never institute salary cuts - it just doesn’t wash with rank-and-file employees. But even more shocking is the part that rankled the sisterhood of secretaries.

While announcing the secretarial pay cuts, IBM also handed out bonuses totaling $5.8 million to its five top executives. Among them is a $2.6 million bonus for IBM chairman and chief executive Louis V. Gerstner Jr., who joined the company two years ago.

And that’s just his bonus.

Gerstner earned $12.4 million in salary, bonuses and other cash compensation in 1994 as well as stock options worth an estimated $21.8 million.

That $2.6 million bonus alone, by the way, is more than the amount the company will save with the secretarial pay cuts.

Now corporate boards always whine about such criticism, saying they’ve got to offer multimillion-dollar packages or lose the best corporate leaders to competitors who will pay up. To which I say, ah, stop whining. Put down your foot. Be tough. Say, “Enough!” Someone in the corporate world has got to do it. The disparity in incomes between corporate CEOs and their army of workers is a national crisis in the making; disgruntled masses are not a pleasant thing.

Besides, as Pamela Gomez, a secretary for a Sacramento law firm, pointed out: “What does someone do with $12 million or $2 million or whatever in a year, anyway?”

Secretaries wouldn’t know, although they’ve been dreaming up some scenarios that might help corporate America see their point of view more clearly.

“We should pull off a nationwide walkout for a week and see how much gets done without us,” an insurance company secretary in New York City wrote to a secretary she knew would be receiving the package she was faxing to Santa Monica for her boss. (The message was written in shorthand, which neither employer can read.)

“Better yet, let’s not correct their spelling and grammatical mistakes for a week and let their colleagues see how inept they are,” the Santa Monica secretary faxed back.

No secretaries? Grounds in the coffee? Smudged photocopies? A run on White Out?

Now that would be a bearish day on Wall Street.

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The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Diana Griego Erwin McClatchy News Service