Greed Responsible for BofA Job Cuts

* Never was the greed of American business and its CEOs more evident than in “Post-Merger BofA Job Cuts Are 60% Deeper Than Planned” [March 25].

Bank of America, following its merger with NationsBank of Charlotte, N.C., in a $37-billion transaction, said it had to “slash” 12,600 positions nationwide. BofA had previously anticipated it would cut 5,000 to 8,000 jobs.

According to a BofA spokesman, the original projection was conservative. Perhaps if the original merger documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission had revealed the larger number, it would have vetoed the transaction. Eighteen hundred of those jobs were cut in BofA’s San Francisco headquarters alone.

The last two paragraphs tell why these additional layoffs might have been necessary: Last year, Hugh McColl, chairman and chief executive of BofA, was paid $76 million. His compensation consisted of $1.25 million in salary, a $2.5-million bonus--for masterminding the job layoffs?--and $44.7 million in stock, plus an astounding $27.2 million in additional stock options.

McColl could have cut his unreasonable compensation by half and still had enough left over to have saved many of those job layoffs.

In my opinion, this sort of greed will be the ruination of the United States. This is the way it started in ancient Rome: unreasonable greed by its rulers.

JOHN AUSTIN

Los Angeles