Im always up for base salary being higher than having more bonuses , makes work lot less stresfull
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.
Pixar uses bonuses a lot. They fired 15% of their workforce before a big bonus coming up.
A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. This is a good thing.
Good
If it is a net benefit for employees.
I can’t see anywhere that says it explicitly or I’m blindSo, 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 © 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).
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.
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.
It would be unusual, at least in the US, for an owner/CEO to be funding company projects out of their own pocket
??? Bruh what. Of course many owners have to fund projects themselves. You’re thinking only of huge stock traded corpos, but there’s a lot more businesses than those lmao.
The company’s money comes from the employees’ efforts.
Yes, and the employee receives a monthly monetary compensation that was previously agreed on. The employee has 0 risk involved - if the company goes bankrupt, the employee just looks for a new job. The owner of said company might face life-long debt.
I’m gladly willing to criticize CEO pay and the stock market in general because those things are fucked up, but this tankie clowning “MIMIMI MEANS OF PRODUCTION” is so fucking cringe. Businesses are more than that, and pretending otherwise is stupid at best and dishonest at worst.
Even with small businesses, the owner’s personal funds and the company’s funds are supposed to be separate. You can get in big trouble for treating them as interchangeable. If the “company” is just you, it’s probably fine, but once you’re big enough to be employing other people, it’s a bad practice. I’ve seen friends face legal trouble because of it. And I don’t see anything tankie about acknowledging that, once you start employing other people, those people are part of the company. The value and utility of the company come from them as much as from the owner–or more, in many cases. That’s literally why a company would want to employ multiple people.
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
If they were born into the same wealth that their master was then sure they would.
If they were, they wouldn’t work for anyone but enjoy their life. So no, it would not be funded by anyone and there would be no product at all.
I don’t think buisness owners being lucky enough to own things
Owning things isn’t lucky. There’s countless businesses that do not inherit an emerald mine. Pretending like every business is founded because of wealth parents is stupid at best and dishonest and manipulative at worst.
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.
I don’t understand why you can’t set up your own business if you want to take the risk yourself.
Like going to the bank and asking for a loan to start a new business would be the textbook example of taking on risk.
Why don’t poor people just make more money?
That’s a super naive understanding of how it works to “setup a business”, outside of I guess a sole-proprietor tiny little situation.
And regardless - let me ask you, why must it be all or nothing? Under your scenario, I either take all of the risk myself by founding the business, or I am strictly paid in dollars by someone who did, and nothing in between - but why? What’s the argument that this is a good way to do things? Am I not taking some risk by buying into the company I work for? Why is that only an option for the very top of the company? Because “risk” is a misnomer that focuses on the wrong part, and actually it’s freaking great to have a true stake in your place of employment?
I’m not arguing that it’s impossible to start a business, or to work and scrape and get lucky and transition into the ownership class in some small capacity. I’m saying having only a few people have true skin in the game for any business is frickin stupid, a bad way to do things, likely to produce half-hearted efforts from employees, and guaranteed to produce the extreme wealth inequality we see today.
Edit: bit more detail on my preferred approach
I was referring to a sole proprieter situation. Like I’m a web dev and I could start a PLC, then I could work on a contract basis with whomever I wanted to. At that point I am assuming risk in terms of choosing the correct clients to get involved with and receiving increased financial renumeration.
You’re not really engaging with my points or questions so I’m gonna move on. I understand how the current situation works quite well, having been involved in many businesses in many different roles throughout my life. Most of us agree the way things work today is awful. I was here to explore fruitful changes to make to the status quo. Not to be told how one can, in fact, seek risk through the joys of sole proprietorship.
Cheers, have a good weekend.
Ok happy to agree to disagree. Have a nice weekend too!
Its referred to as barriers to entry. These are anything that prevents new startups from occuring. These can be natural or contrived.
As somebody who finally started their own business after 25 years of effort and a lot of luck I know these well.
The largest barrier is usually initial capital. Banks don’t give out loans to startups without assets. So if you have overall negative personal assets like large student loans, renting, car loans, etc you are fucked in getting a bank to fund your startup. I can’t get a line of credit for at least a year, probably 2. At least not one at a reasonable interest rate that doesn’t eatup all of my profit. I ended up taking a draw against expected revenue from a vendor who believes in me.
Health insurance (U.S), literally the reason I didn’t start my business 10 years ago & 5 years ago when I had 2 opportunities.
Business insurance: it took me 5 months to find somebody that would cover me.
Laws and regulations that create barriers to entry. These can be minor annoyance like fees and paperwork or major regulatory hurdles depending on the industry and country.
Infrastructure to conduct the business. I need highly specialized warehousing for 4 months of the year. I ended up renting from a company that is in a similar business as me that runs on a different cycle (they are empty when I need space). Building my own would require a loan… See above.
Available resources: Do competitors limit your available resources by market manipulation and anti-competative behavior. This is a huge one in industries dominated by oligarchies.
There are many more of these that are around.
Most of these can be alleviated by a fair sharing of revenue. 10 years ago I increased the companies net profit from $500K to $10million. They gave me 5% pay raise and $10k bonus out of a “Theoretical” $200K max.
Thank you, very useful to have someone who has done it in the thread. Would you agree that being born into one of the wealthy families in America would dramatically reduce the difficulty and risk of everything you’ve described above? All that stuff sounds so much easier if you’re rich enough to pay others to do a bunch of it, and rich enough to still be fine (even still rich, usually!) if it doesn’t work out.
Yeah it is really funny how an entity that controls dozens of people’s lives only benefits the “king” at the top.
I was raised to think we were above having kings and slave masters in the modern era.
You said “Corporations shouldn’t be allowed to make a profit.”
Even in my wildest liberal dreams, I can’t invent a sentence so brazenly unrealistic. If you don’t want corporations to make a profit, you basically don’t want corporations at all. It’s pointless to even frame things in the context of capitalism at that point.
Capitalism is an evil and shitty system. Just say that, instead of trying to redefine what capitalism is.
Corporations had their profits taxed at 90% and had to convince the city council to let them open each location of their businesses requiring that they would actually provide a needed service to the community.
This was less than 100 years ago.
I’m sorry that propaganda is so effective on you.
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.
