John Mackey: Food Fighter

From a long profile on the always quirky and eccentric John Mackey in The New Yorker:

Mackey, an outspoken critic of executive overcompensation, pays himself $1 a year. No one at the company can have a salary more than nineteen times what the average team member makes. (On average, an S&P 500 CEO makes 319 times what a production worker does.) Last year, the highest salary went to Walter Robb, the co-president and chief operating officer, who made just over $400,000 (supplemented by a bonus and stock options). The average hourly wage was $16.50.

Whole Foods has made Mackey a wealthy man. He owns roughly $30 million in stock—less than one per cent of the company—and has sold millions more over the years. Still, he flies commercial and drives a Honda Civic hybrid.

Whole Foods routinely ranks high on those lists of companies that are the best to work for. The health and retirement benefits are relatively generous. Mackey regards his blend of paternalism and sovereignty as a recipe for proper governance, an expression of both compassion and creativity. This view is not shared by unions, which have complained that Mackey prevents unionization among his employees, notably at a store in Madison, Wisconsin, where team members had voted to unionize. Unions have picketed store openings and, as activist investors in Whole Foods stock, have called for Mackey’s firing.

In the early eighties, Mackey told a reporter, “The union is like having herpes. It doesn’t kill you, but it’s unpleasant and inconvenient, and it stops a lot of people from becoming your lover.” (That quote, to Mackey’s dismay, won’t go away.) His disdain for contemporary unionism is ideological, as well as self-serving. Like many who have come before, he says that it was only when he started a business—when he had to meet payroll and deal with government red tape—that his political and economic views, fed on readings of Friedman, Rand, and the Austrians, veered to the right.

HT: Joy Pavelski