Disney directors get handsome raise

A few minutes after 5 p.m. on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving the Mouse House filed a brief attachment to its 10-K document. In it, reports footnoted.com, the company presented a new pay package for directors who are not employees. The cash retainer, for instance, goes to $100,000 from $80,000. The audit-committee chairman now gets an additional $20,000 a year, instead of $15,000. Directors receive $150,000 a year in deferred stock that can be turned into actual shares in two years. From footnoted:

Each individual element looks like small potatoes, but once you begin adding it up -- including the unchanged $10,000-per-year fee received for sitting on each committee -- and, well, it begins to add up. Last year, directors made between $219,000 and $254,009, with most of them hovering right around the quarter-million mark. These new increases are sure to bump that up. (Chairman John E. Pepper Jr. made $561,606, thanks to a hefty chairman's retainer that's staying put at $500,000 in stock, though he gets to keep his after a year or less.)

Perhaps worth noting that Disney has gone through several rounds of layoffs in the last year or two - and from what I've heard many of the surviving employees have had to double up on work assignments. One action doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the other, but it looks kind of bad.