Friends in High Places: The Bechtel Story : The Most Secret Corporation and How It Engineered the Wo by Laton Mccartney (readict .txt) 📗

Under pressure on all fronts, Bechtel began going after costs with a meat-ax. Some trims-like selling off two of the company’s three corporate jets, ordering all but the most senior executives to fly coach and installing reflector panels behind the fluorescent lights in each office (a measure that saved $400,000 in electricity bills per year}-were comparatively easy. Others, such as scrapping Steve junior’s cherished plans to build a $100 million office complex in downtown Oakland, and along with it, closing down several of the company’s outlying offices, ing with Arizona governor Bruce Babbitt. The topic of their discussion was the Bechtel-built Palo Verde, Arizona, nuclear plant, which at the time was three years behind schedule and, at $5 billion and mounting, was the costliest nuclear facility in the United States.

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FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES

were more painful. But the biggest wrench came in paring down the work force. Between 1982 and 1987, some 22,000 employees-almost half of the Bechtel “family”-were lopped off the company payroll, the majority of them in two mass firings that occurred just before Christmas 1984 and 198 5. Company executives too felt the pinch: in 1982, 58 had been employed at the senior corporate vice-presidential level or higher; by 1987, that number had dwindled to 37. Those who remained had their salaries frozen, their yearly bonuses stripped back by as much as 80 percent and the majority of their corporate perquisites eliminated.

The cutbacks and the firings, and the manner in which they were accomplished, engendered enormous bitterness, especially among the large number of discharged middle managers, many of them in their mid-50s “It’s like the military,” one fired executive told a reporter. “If you’ve been a major too long, forget it.”4 “The fast-trackers, the Harvard MBAs, are the ones Bechtel is keeping,” added a fired cost engineer with sixteen years at the company. “I don’t think that Bechtel will ever be thought of as a ‘family’ again.”5 “They tend to act like God,”

said still another executive, as he contemplated the prospect of unemployment, “but not with nearly the compassion. “6

As the belt-tightening continued, the survivors began fixing blame, with many tracing the company’s woes to the departure of George Shultz. “Shultz’ leaving nearly proved the death knell of the company,”

said Raynal Mayman, Bechtel’s former treasurer. “Without his financial expertise, Bechtel really got caught with its pants down when the recession hit.”7 “Shultz was one of the few people in the company who could-and would-bring Steve junior the bad news, when there was bad news to be delivered,” added another senior-level Bechtel executive. “Most of the corporate vicepresidents were afraid of upsetting the chairman. The upshot was, if you had a problem, you simply swept it under the rug. At Bechtel, the downside risk in telling the emperor he wasn’t wearing any clothes was enormous. You had nothing to gain and your career to lose. “8

Belatedly, Steve junior began to realize that at least some of what his critics were saying was right, and began putting together what he called

“a board of special counselors.” Composed of retired corporate heavyweights like Citibank’s Walter Wriston, IBM’s Frank Cary, Du Pont’s Irving Shapiro, Utah Construction’s Ed Littlefield and Socal’s Harold Haynes, this board of “special counselors,” Bechtel told an interviewer, “is our answer to an outside board of directors. These were people 232