disappointingly dull to outsiders: a bunch of engineers sitting around in golf shirts sipping craft beers.
One of their favorite gathering places was a pub called the Ginger Man, located near Rice University, not too far from 20 Greenway Plaza. The pub was located on a quiet side street, set back behind a grassy patio area. It was a small, wood-framed bungalow that was obscured from view during summer months by leafy trees that sheltered picnic tables and a large front porch. Customers walked past a small picket fence to enter the patio and then up a set of rickety wooden steps. A small placard by the front door announced drink specials on a hand-written menu scribbled in brightly colored chalk.
Inside, the bar was pleasingly dim and cave-like. Although the Koch traders were unaware of the fact, the bar was a near replica of the Coates Bar in Minnesota, where the union workers used to gather in the 1970s after their shifts at the Pine Bend refinery. The layout of the two establishments was virtually identical, with a long bar extending along the left side of the room and wooden tables clustered along the right side. The ceiling was low in both places, and the wood-paneled walls seemed to be stained the same honey-blond color. But the Ginger Man was more refined—it was like the Coates Bar reimagined by an interior designer who kept the charming elements and jettisoned the unseemly parts. While the Coates Bar served Miller Lite or its equivalent, the Ginger Man had a menu of dozens of craft beers that were arrayed along the bar with their own custom taps. The Koch Industries traders didn’t drink like their blue-collar counterparts up in Minnesota—they didn’t line up shots of hard liquor to be pounded one after another, as the OCAW president Joseph Hammerschmidt had done.
But the Koch traders were just like their unionized predecessors in one way. When they got together and drank at the Ginger Man, they bitched about how underpaid they were.
Koch had hired engineers to staff its trading desk, and it continued to pay them like engineers once they learned the job. O’Neill, for example, was still making $60,000 a year. There was a creeping awareness spreading throughout the trading floor that things didn’t have to be this way. There were rumors that traders over at Enron were making multiples of $60,000. And Wall Street banks started calling with job offers that were far richer than what Koch offered.
O’Neill was not a disloyal person. He had worked for Koch his entire career. But financial pressures were beginning to press down on him. His credit card debt, in particular, was problematic. In this, he wasn’t alone. America’s middle class stopped seeing significant pay increases after the 1990s, but they did enjoy a new source of spending power: an easy availability of credit. The loosening of laws around banking during the eighties and nineties paved the way for a flood of consumer debt. At places like nearby Rice University, credit card companies set up booths to greet incoming students, promising easy access to large lines of credit. It had never been easier for Americans to borrow, and they used the privilege to supplement the lag in their paychecks. The tide that lifted all boats during the 1990s was fueled by credit cards that carried 14 percent interest rates or higher. The monthly payments could eat a person alive. O’Neill and his wife were happily married, but that didn’t mean it was easy. They lived within a constricting web of household spending budget. It was hard not to argue when money was tight.
It might have been disappointing, then, to discover that Koch’s trading floor wasn’t an easy path to riches in the mid-1990s. When O’Neill earned $7 million for the company that first year, he might have reasonably expected a large bonus. At the end of the year, he discussed his performance with Sam Soliman and was told that his incentive reward would be $25,000. That was about 0.004 percent of what O’Neill had just earned for the company. Soliman seemed sympathetic to the idea that traders should earn a bigger cut of the profits. But Charles Koch seemed intent on paying the traders like engineers. And O’Neill’s bosses knew that his best annual bonus at the refinery was $10,000 a year.
“Sam’s like, ‘It’s a lot better than the refinery, right?’ ” O’Neill recalled with a laugh. “And I’m like, ‘Yep. Yep. You’re right. It is.’ ”
Not all traders were