This week, the leaders of some of Charlotte's biggest companies gathered uptown for the Charlotte Regional Business Alliance's annual economic forecast. The takeaway for next year is that there are some big challenges on the horizon. For more, Tony Mecia of the Charlotte Ledger Business Newsletter joined WFAE’s Marshall Terry for our segment BizWorthy.
Marshall Terry: Tony, which leaders took part in this gathering, and what challenges are they talking about?
Tony Mecia: Brian Moynihan of Bank of America, Gene Woods of Advocate Health, which is the parent company of Atrium Health, and Palmer Brown of Compass Group.
They talked about a few different challenges that the economy's facing. One of them, they said, was immigration policy and some of the policies from Washington. They said that businesses are going to rely on having workers and so if you have fewer workers who are available, that could be a problem for a lot of small businesses.
That's according to some of the reporting from the folks who were there from local media. There's some question marks, definitely I think about the workforce going forward.
Terry: Any bright spots they highlighted? I mean, the economy seems pretty OK, for now, at least.
Mecia: Yeah, I thought it was interesting reading about what Brian Moynihan had to say. The banks typically have real-time data, so it's kind of a nice window into the economy. He said that holiday shopping spending was up 5% to 6% over last year. So the fact that consumer spending is remaining strong, I think, is good.
Economists at his bank also predicted the economy growing by 2.4% next year. So that's a bright spot. Several of the CEOs mentioned artificial intelligence and efficiency gains that come from A.I., while still keeping an eye on making sure that humans are in control and that it doesn't get too out of control.
Terry: Automaker startup Scout made a big splash last month with the announcement of their huge headquarters move to Charlotte. But you report this week that even as they make their cars locally, they could face problems selling them to North Carolina consumers. What's going on there?
Mecia: A lot of people might not realize this, but all those car dealerships that you pass on Independence Boulevard or in Pineville, those are actually required by law in order to sell cars in North Carolina. So upstart automakers like Scout and Rivian, they're not allowed to have showrooms or dealerships that they own in North Carolina because North Carolina is like more than a dozen other states that have laws that require dealerships and that you cannot sell directly to consumers. I think Scout and some of these other upstart carmakers are hoping that the laws are changed and relaxed, but these have been on the books for several decades and that might be an uphill battle.
Terry: In a rare move, Charlotte-based CPI Security Systems is suing an attorney who represented one of the company’s former employees in a discrimination settlement. So why is CPI suing the attorney and what are the details on that settlement?
Mecia: So this is a lawsuit that was filed by CPI last month against attorney Michael Littlejohn. We don't have details of the settlement, but this involves a client of Littlejohn's who's a former CPI employee who was alleging discrimination.
The suit that CPI brought alleges that Littlejohn sent confidential information, not to CPI's attorney, but also to its human resources department and others who were not supposed to have access to confidential information. They said this was a tactic in order to try to coerce a settlement from CPI. CPI did wind up settling with the employee, but they also sued the lawyer for some of those tactics, they said.
Terry: Let’s turn to the pay package of Atrium Health CEO Gene Woods, which at $25.8 million has raised some eyebrows. The Ledger wanted more context and did some comparisons with the pay for other Charlotte CEOs. What did you find?
Mecia: It's hard to compare the pay of a nonprofit to the pay of a for-profit business for a variety of reasons. But if you just look at the numbers that are reported in SEC documents, you can see that Woods' salary is approaching what the CEOs of Wells Fargo and Bank of America make. Woods' pay is more than the CEOs of Duke Energy, Lowe's, Nucor, Honeywell, and most other publicly-traded Charlotte companies.
Spokespeople for Atrium and Advocate Health point out that it is a large and complex organization with 162,000 employees and $35 billion in revenues. That has certainly increased over Woods' tenure there. It is one of the largest healthcare systems in the country. They say that it is an appropriate pay package, given the complexity of the organization.
