Here a perk, there a perk, everywhere a perk perk

I missed this Slate article when it came out last month, regarding the newest trend in executive perks: sheltering their homes from a loss in case of a market downturn.

Since the beginning of this summer, at least a half-dozen companies, including eBay and Nike, have disclosed in their routine Securities and Exchange Commission filings that they're now protecting their executives from real estate market forces. The terms in the filings vary—"protection against loss"; "loss protection"; and "price protection"—but the meaning is the same: They are essentially guaranteeing that executives' homes will sell for a good price. In other words, companies that depend on free markets are making sure their own executives are safeguarded from them. In the past, companies often offered to buy a relocating executive's house if didn't sell after a specific amount of time. But that's different than the price guarantees being offered now.

What drew my attention to the Slate article was a post at footnoted.org (a great site that pulls buried facts from corporations' SEC filings) by the same author. She caught this in a recent 8K from The Clorox Co:

Under the deal that brings Coca-Cola’s (KO) North American president Donald Knauss to the CEO spot at Clorox, the company will provide the new executive with a $50,000 "loss protection" on the sale of his home in Atlanta. Now, granted, $50K isn’t a lot of money in the greater scheme of things — after all, Clorox’s market cap is $9 billion and Knauss will be paid $950K a year and receive a $500K signing bonus. But as I wrote in Slate, the idea of protecting top executives of publicly traded companies — the very people you’d expect to epitomize the power of free markets — from market forces just because those markets happen to be declining seems more than a bit ironic.

Companies continue to insulate their executives, further removing them from market forces in which they must compete. Compensation packages increasingly contain only upside features--giving plenty of incentive as the company grows, but providing no downside if the executive fails. Well, other than paying him off and sending him on his way to his next corporate victim.