Sony and Bandai Namco abolish employee bonuses in favor of raising average salaries
Sony and Bandai Namco abolish employee bonuses in favor of raising average salaries - AUTOMATON WEST
If it is a net benefit for employees.
I can't see anywhere that says it explicitly or I'm blind
So, in Japan, this has a couple of functions, but one major one. By keeping salaries low and offering bonuses, employees can basically be only compensated the bare minimum in the case they (a) are no longer wanted (since firing is very hard here), (b) not performing as well as expected for whatever reason, or (c) the company did particularly poorly.
As mentioned, it ties into one of the levers they have to pull for under-performing or bad-fit employees they might want to get rid of in a country where workers have a fair bit of rights on that front.
On the other, it does make some applications/calculations a little weird as some home loans etc. have repayments that expect those bonus payments (either a higher amount twice-yearly or two extra payments per year). Most companies in Japan pay monthly (and most of those on the 25th or closest preceding business day).
A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. This is a good thing.
That's a true team building, stop giving gifts to "anchormen" or "good performers"
I work for a company that does profit sharing which is paid out equally to all regular employees, definitely beats circus that happened in places that did arbitrary bonuses. Best place I worked at even though I was a beneficiary of those arbitrary bonuses. You can plan if you know what your profit sharing is based on and people like financial stability.
The biggest company I worked for was a great place to be, but they were a US company. I kept going to performance reviews, getting managers give me the "good news, you got the big bonus this year". My response was consistently "cool, but I'm a base salary guy, I'd rather just keep doing the same job and getting a base salary bump" and they kept being very confused by this.
Good people, good conditions, I had no complaints, but they just couldn't parse this. They kept explaining to me how big the bonuses could get, I kept not being motivated at all by this.
What's disgusting is that bonuses are often based on prior merits and not actual and current ones.
Good
Pixar uses bonuses a lot. They fired 15% of their workforce before a big bonus coming up.
Im always up for base salary being higher than having more bonuses , makes work lot less stresfull
Corporations shouldn't be allowed to make a profit.
Any excess profit should be distributed to the employees equally.
The idea that a corporation should only benefit like 3 people at the top is a relatively new beleif
Are the employees also funding the next project out of their own pockets?
The money companies use to fund projects comes from the value of employees' labor. It would be unusual, at least in the US, for an owner/CEO to be funding company projects out of their own pocket. The company's money comes from the employees' efforts.
If they were born into the same wealth that their master was then sure they would.
I don't think buisness owners being lucky enough to own things means that workers shouldn't get an equal share
Companies can make a lot of money + pay shareholders without ever declaring profits. Look at Amazon for a case of weird accounting.
More generally, I also disagree with this idea because the incentives to become an employer would be decreased and ultimately it's the business owners who are taking risks.
What if instead of zero profits, all employees are paid in part via some amount of ownership stake in any company?
My issue with the "we take all the risk, tho!" argument is that I'm never even allowed to take the risk, too. For example, my current company is small, compensation has grown disappointing after we were acquired by VC, and there is no pathway for me to begin purchasing any kind of ownership stake. We're just the labor, despite all of us having been here longer than the new owner, in many cases having been here to build the thing the new owners bought.
So it must be pretty damn attractive, actually, for those at the top to continually offer that to one another, while withholding it from anyone below executive leadership. I'm pretty tired of hearing it as a justification when those "taking all the risk" end up doing so goddamn well, and the rest of us are locked out of it in the first place. It's just abusive language we've all internalized.
Edit to add: ya know, it was probably easier to swallow and originated in the prior eras, where a steady paycheck was a safe and stable way to go through life. These days being an underpaid wage slave is far riskier than being any kind of investor. I don't think "all the risk" is even meaningful or remotely accurate anymore.
The idea that a corporation should only benefit like 3 people at the top is a relatively new beleif
So the caricatures of ultra wealthy factory owners from the 19th century were just visionary fantasy?
Yes 1.5 lifetimes ago is not a long time
Mid century capitalism was certainly more worker focussed. CEOs salaries were more like single digit/low double digit multiples of average worker salaries. Profit got reinvested into development. Companies would literally brag about how well their employees were paid. This is the era that saw the US become a powerhouse globally.
Then Jack fucking Welch came along. He's the motherfucker that started this crap with closing marginally profitable departments because it increased the overall profitability of the company as a %, which increased the stock price.
If corpo decides to do this, it is a net benefit to the company and not the employees. I await my own shit corp implementing this in the future...
See other comments here. Long term this is what employees prefer. I work in a company that does a bit of universal bonus and doesn’t skimp on salary increases and that’s much better than me getting 20% yearly salary as an arbitrary bonus because I can’t depend on it to be there the next year.
Interesting and with credibility, Misk as I tend to agree with your posts and comments (+20!). I just don't trust my company even after 20 years and moving into leadership years ago, so anytime I see a corporation making a choice like this I can't help but be extremely skeptical.
I would always prefer a base salary increase to my arbitrary bonus, but with the balance between net benefit to employees over the bottom line of the Corp, why would a company do it if it didn't pay out less in the long run? Or are they counting on merit based salary levels for performant individuals being a better deal over typical company-wide gaming of bonuses being easier to control?
Reading the article it seems to be related to a shortage of labour in Japan, so not my situation where we have been laying off people for years now. I'd love it if we did this for positive reasons like attracting better talent and increasing average salaries. I guess that's where my disconnect is.
Anything to avoid improving the workers' well-being.
Edit: they abolished the bonus that is the cultural norm and consistently given out every year, and redistributed it across the workers regular pay. Sony and Bamco now get to advertise a higher salary without actually giving workers any more money.
Actual "Why are you booing me? I'm right" moment.
Damn, this isn’t even a “did you even read the article”, it’s “did you even read the headline?”
Did you read it? They abolished a bonus and redistributed it across their regular pay. They now get to advertise a higher salary without actually giving their workers any more money.
Are higher salaries not better for the workers?
Not only higher, but also more stable since, unlike bonuses, a salary cannot be cancelled for some reason.
They abolished the bonus that is the cultural norm and consistently given out every year, and redistributed it across the workers regular pay. Sony and Bamco now get to advertise a higher salary without actually giving workers any more money.
I quit my last job partially because they kept on about xmas bonuses if the company did well, nah fucko, just pay me better. Don't offer me shrodingers bonus.
lol “If” that’s worse than the article…Chevy Chase all over this.
The real gift was the suspense. Schrodingers bonus, alive as a carrot, dead as a payment…Merry Christmas shareholders ho-ho-ho.