Someone needed to accept responsibility. The buck stops here.

What a tragedy. 

Agree completely, Hankers.

Too bad the buck rarely stops where it clearly should. 

I expect he'll have a large payoff for going...

Yup, and that's what truly stinks about upper crust empoyees... they can fech up in a major way and get paid for it... but the ordinary blue collar worker not only gets fired but loses acrued benefits into the bargain... and/or has to pay the company compensation for its losses.

It's like that idiot Truillo who came frome the States and left our leading telco in far worse shape than he found it, due to poor decisions on his part.... walked away with 11 mill AND stock options.  Frankly, I would have locked the bastard up and siezed all his assets for the cock-ups.

Umm, curious about something? Did the CEO even have a say, or was even aware of the details, in the decision to use substandard methods to protect their customers.  My wife works for Target and she is getting screwed out of hours because someone made the call to use some free software protection for security of a multi-million(billion?) dollar company.

While I don't mind seeing a CEO being forced to step down but I rather see the guy who made the decisions also canned. 

Wait one. If you can prove that, then I suspect you (and the other employees) have an actionable issue. To me, there would be an issue in deducting wages from employees for the decision of an executive who walks away with millions. I suspect other Americans wouldn't appreciate that either. You should consult a labor lawyer about that.

Doc.. I may be mistaken, But I think the reference to being screwed out of hours, refers to them reducing the hours offered to employees during a work week dropping them from let's say a 40 hour week to a 30- 20-10 5 hours week and running skeleton crews..

Many companies do this, stores typically have a monthly budget of hours for employees they can offer, when companies lose money they drop the number of hours the store has to offer the employees, typically they either fire some employees and keep the rest working full time.. or they reduce a proportionate amount of the employees weekly hours. The fat cat's rarely take the hit themselves for their screw-ups''... It's usually their employees who are barely scraping by who pay for it. Not to mention the consumer's who now get a lower standard of service due to understaffed stores.

You know the old adage.. shit rolls down hill...

HG...Illauna wrote this:

"My wife works for Target and she is getting screwed out of hours because someone made the call to use some free software protection for security of a multi-million(billion?) dollar company."

I don't see what you see there.

We had a super that messed up and made a $15,000 mistake on a job we were working, they immediately laid off a few people deemed un-necessary and cut the rest of our crew down to full time with no chance of over time, we all griped about being "screwed out of hours" to cover the supers mistake. While we weren't actually being ripped off and our hours worked/ time cards weren't being altered, we felt screwed..

Why? because we typically would work 5 days a week at 10-12 hours a day getting 10+ hours of over time a week which helped cover the costs of being away from home for month's on end and to make it worth missing our family's.

Construction companies bid job's with a pre-estimated number of man hours figured in to the bid including over time etc. and get's paid for those hours by the Prime contractor whether or not we actually work the amount of hours bid. But when they reduced our hours available, the crew got paid less per week, yet had to perform the same amount of work faster and with fewer people to finish the job on time. (which in the construction industry can be hazardous if not fatal.) All so the company could keep the overtime and would not have absorb the loss internally.

Any hourly worker who's hours are cut to offset some higher-up's brainfart/store shrinkage: Ie theft/ etc.. will typically use the term "screwed out of hours" to describe their predicament. It is becoming an increasingly common phrase..

But yes if they are altering time cards etc.. that is against the law and actionable.

Large retail corporations typically pass the losses on to the employees and customers legally thru reduced hours and service.  I would almost doubt that a corporation of their size caught up right now in the midst of this scandal, would want to make such a legal blunder by forging/altering time cards, intentionally withholding employees pay or illegally reducing the hourly wage of the employees etc.. as a way to cover the losses...

So I surmised from past experience the intent of the phrase. "Screwed out of hours". to be a loss of hours available.. If the phrase used was "Screwed out of wages/pay" I would have been more inclined to think they were actually messing with payroll... 

Tho again..I could be mistaken..

Having read up on how the breach was accomplished and how Target's IT department willfully ignored flags telling them they had a problem in plenty of time to prevent the breach, it should have been the IT chief's head on the block.  They even had a system installed that would have automatically blocked the malware but hadn't enabled it because they didn't yet trust it to work and failed to take the necessary manual steps once the system told them the malware was present.  Maybe he/she got the chop but I haven't seen confirmation.  Buck stops & all that, but it's not clear how much knowledge of what was going on in his IT department the CEO had.  Not that he isn't ultimately responsible, but on a practical level he would have to trust what his IT people were telling him & they hosed him (and the company) in the worst way.

And this wasn't the first time Target had such a breach - happened back in 2005, too.

Linked story in the OP says she got canned a couple of months ago.

Thanks for the pointer.  Missed it.  Figured it had to have happened, tho.

I hope this trend continues.  Prior to this, it seemed the CEO's could royally screw their customer base, abuse the employees, etc., and get rewarded with multi million dollar golden parachutes.  As many posts above this one noted:  the buck stops with the CEO, that does not mean the money stops there, but real responsibility does.  Lets see more of this!  Goldman sachs is about to go under because they are gambling with client assets in the sub prime mortgage markets?  Fire the CEOS and try them for fraud.