Transocean Executives to Donate Meager Portion of Unearned Bonuses

Can you spell "insensitive"? Sure you can.

How about "insufficient"?

Consider this headline: "Transocean Executives to Donate Bonuses".

How generous, you may think. If you've forgotten, it was Transocean that owned the Deepwater Horizon rig that exploded last April in the Macondo area of the Gulf of Mexico; eleven rig workers died in the accident. The bonuses will go to a fund established for the victims' families.

Wait a minute: bonuses? What are the bonuses for? Among other things, for "the best year in safety performance in our company's history." (click here for Forbes's Jeff McMahon's take on this)

Transocean has since allowed that the wording of their announcement was "insensitive". I can think of other adjectives.

The remainder of the bonuses awarded appear to be for additional work ... responding to the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

According to the Transocean annual report,

Many of our senior executive officers… dedicated a significant portion of their time in 2010 following the Macondo Incident to responding to the needs of the victims’ families, coordinating the involvement of additional resources required to stem the flow of hydrocarbons, including drilling rigs and personnel to drill relief wells and other operations as requested by the Unified Area Command, cooperating with the numerous federal, state, and local reviews and investigations into the incident, overseeing our internal investigation of the incident, and managing other demands stemming from these activities, in addition to performing their normal responsibilities.

And this means that these executives are due additional compensation?!? And it was an "Incident"?!?

The headline I quoted above is from today's Wall Street Journal (click here for Dionne Searcy's article; note that most is behind a pay wall). In the article, Searcy reports that while the five senior executives are donating their safety bonuses, the total sum dontated ($250,000) represents slightly more than one-quarter of their overall bonuses.

I think mine is a more accurate headline: "Transocean Executives to Donate Meager Portion of Unearned Bonuses".