Personally, I've always thought of stock options as an employee discipline thing - you're locked into the job, and they're used to excuse a lower salary - rather than a tax evasion thing. The article in question sounds like a stab at populism - examining corps as robber barons, rather than understanding modern corporate power as discipline.
Peter
[Warning - I'm neither and accountant nor a tax lawyer, but..]
Options have a multitude of advantages:
They lock in employees. This can be done by other things, such as pension plans which frequently weight the last few years of service heavily, so two 15-years at two companies don't add up to a 30-year at one company.
They transfer risk from the company to the employee. If the company doesn't do well, the opionts turn out worthless, whereas an extra $20K/year of salary for two-three years is still $40-60K.
This $40-60K also doesn't have to be paid, so this is nice for companies which don't have much cash.
They don't appear as a liability in accounting standards. A company can have a huge number of shares potentially liable in employee stock options, but those don't appear in the standard reports. Where salaries and bonus plans do. For example, I was told once that Microsoft recently had to spend all of their profits for one quarter to buy the stock to award options which were being exercised. This is an expense, and not trivial. However, it didn't show up as even a potential expense until it actually happened.
Barry