Employment
ERISA

Where an employee was offered a higher salary to remain after a merger, he was properly denied severance under a golden parachute clause.

"$169,000 a year exceeds $167,000 a year. Williams wants us to look at the total value of his compensation package, including all fringe benefits, rather than at salary alone. But the Plan says 'salary' rather than 'compensation'. It is possible to require a comparison of fringe benefits as well as salary; the plan in Bowles v. Quantum Chemical Co., 266 F.3d 622, 628 (7th Cir. 2001), did just that. This Plan limits the comparison to salary, perhaps because the same package of fringe benefits has different values to different people. If an employer offers every executive two weeks at a beach bungalow, what is the benefit's value when the executive prefers to ski and thinks that beaches just produce skin cancer? Campbell Mithun offered Williams $300 a month toward the cost of parking, and GreenHouse offered only $100; but if Williams walked to work or took the train, these came to the same thing. We are willing to assume that Campbell Mithun's complete package of fringe benefits was substantially more valuable to Williams than GreenHouse's; this may be why Williams quit. But that does not avoid the fact that the Plan specifies a lower salary, rather than a lower total compensation, as the trigger for severance benefits. Nor can Williams use the difference in fringe benefits to argue that his position at GreenHouse would not have been 'comparable' to his position at Campbell Mithun: the Plan treats compensation separately from the comparability of the old and new jobs."

Affirmed.

07-3146 Williams v. The Interpublic Severance Pay Plan

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Zagel, J., Easterbrook, J.

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