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Amazon Is Eliminating Bonuses, Stock Awards to Help Pay for Raises (bloomberg.com)
Amazon is eliminating monthly bonuses and stock awards for warehouse workers and other hourly employees after the company pledged this week to raise pay to at least $15 an hour, Bloomberg reported Wednesday. From a report: Warehouse workers for the e-commerce giant in the U.S. were eligible in the past for monthly bonuses that could total hundreds of dollars per month as well as stock awards, said two people familiar with Amazon's pay policies. The company informed those employees Wednesday that it's eliminating both of those compensation categories to help pay for the raises, the people said. Amazon received plaudits when it announced Monday that the company would raise its minimum pay. The pay increase warded off criticism from politicians and activists, and put the company in a good position to recruit temporary workers for the important holiday shopping season.
Amazon actually put out a statement on this that isn't in the TFS. Surveys showed that current employees would prefer more predictable pay to the bonuses. Makes sense when your income is relatively low. Bonuses are nice but you can't count on them. Being assured of a paycheck is more useful short-term. Now maybe Amazon is full of it in their statement but TFS is one-sided in a misleading way.
Everyone gets paid the same regardless of productivity? This should be good news for those advocating the $15/hr minimum wage.
In other news, Bmazon workers now must meet minimum quotas every three minutes to receive their quota of air.
Requiem for the American Dream
I mean did anyone really think they were going to pay for it from their profit margins?
There's always a catch.
Otherwise known as Three-Card Monte.
Someday soon, someone is going to make a killing selling Guillotines!
MSFT did this to its developers few years ago. The real reason is the way the stock award is structured the stock price is set to the lowest price in the award period, which incentivizes people to sell, putting constant downward pressure on the stock price. The real con here is they eliminated the stock awards, and converted that part of total compensation into salary. Don't be amazed when they do this to their developers, too, if they haven't already.
This is exactly the parable of socialized grades. They're removing the incentive for high performance to pay for low performing workers to get a raise (high performing workers likely already make more than $15/hr).
So, now, not only is there no incentive to be a better worker, those who are better workers will make "not as much more" than low-performing workers, which further disincentivizes good work.
Bezos will rue the day he allowed this to happen.
Wonder if those who already have options through the previous plan lose them?
Studies show only 10% of the population responds to performance pay (bonuses, etc). A net zero change for Amazon. Lol
Everyone gets paid the same regardless of productivity? This should be good news for those advocating the $15/hr minimum wage.
Remember that when your job is sent overseas to someone who is just as, if not more productive than you for half the price.
Now, let's cue up the "yeah, but the work is subpar and needs rework, wah wah wah."
Keep telling yourself that, it'll just make it more of a shock when you're canned. Quite a few large IT services, software, tech companies have been doing that successfully for a couple of decades now.
pay raises are more desirable than bonuses since they are cumulative. But of course, total compensation is total compensation and bonuses allow more merit recognition at the cost of lowering the retention aspects of higher salaries.
Since amazon is going to more and more automation it may turn out that those higher paying jobs will be gone in a few years making this non-cumulative and just the same as a bonus from amaazons point of view. The higher they can raise the wages of their non-automated competition the better. e.g. raise the wages of UPS and Fed-ex who, susrprisingly, are not as automated as amazon, then move into their bussiness with cheaper logistics, drone delivery.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Yes, indeed, people mostly prefer being told what they will make, instead of a "we will maybe pay you more if we feel like it, or maybe not, we'll let you know later" salary
SAD. Such a shithoke country... richest man can't afford to pay his employees a living wage?
SHITHOLE COUNTRY.
You have TWICE as many per capita as Canada.
#FREEDUMBS
I would of been more impressed if the money was taken from executives' bonuses. It would take peanuts away from the executives, but made them looked like they really cared.
Because paying a higher minimum wage means you can't pay a better performer more than that or give them a promotion?
too bad they will not end bonuses to management. In the end, I guess it is better to get a more consistent and higher paycheck than relying on bonuses you may or may not get.
I'd rather have the bonuses & stocks I know many people that in the late 70's went to work for "Wal-Mart" (now Walmart) that got paid squat for an hourly wage, but went hog wild with stock options and the like, that are now retired and "sitting pretty" when they cashed in all the stocks & what not. People today, don't think more than a few months down the road. If you go to work when you are 18-25 and don't get "much" of a salary, but are offered a retirement plan, deferred bonuses, stocks & what not, some if done right, could "retire" at 50ish and not be concerned about retirement. This will SAVE Amazon a ton of money in the long run.
Bonuses are usually taxed at 30% (at least mine were when I worked in private sector). It's better to get that money as regular salary and pay a lower tax rate on it.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
It's a much different world than what it was back in the 1970's. A person in the US can't live off minimum wage working 40 hours, especially in the larger cities. What good is saving a stock until your retirement when if you're lucky you can pay to have a roof over your head but you're stuck deciding between the electricity bill and food. It may not be exactly that combination but many people today are having to make a similar choice because minimum wage hasn't kept up with inflation. People need a living wage not a minimum wage.
You are an idiot. You must think your annual refund is "free money" too? Higher taxes get withheld from large checks such as one that includes a bonus, as each one calculated as if all checks were of that size. However you are taxed on your overall income for the year, so any over-payment or underpayment comes back to you come tax time.
For a moment there I thought that they were eliminating executive stocks and bonuses to pay for this.
Silly me, how could I possibly imagine that happening!
THE SOFTWARE, IT NO WORKY!!!
What? No they are not. No country that I know of does this (I have people reporting to me across NA/SA/EU and have never heard of this). Bonuses are treated as regular income. It makes no difference if $X comes via bonus or salary; the marginal rate changes based on the total.
No. Your employer withheld at 30% because it was easy math for their payroll department at bonus time and likely to be an overpayment, rather than an underpayment. It is taxed at exactly the same rate as the rest of your income, based on your tax bracket (as determined by annual income).
You are wholly misinformed and your post a litany of poor logic. A train wreck.
Squat back in the 70's is more than squat today.
You think most Amazon warehouse employees are 18-25??? Most pickers are, but those are being automated and there aren't that many of them. Packers, etc. tend to be fairly old (say, 40's+)
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Yes, people making 20k a year are always worried about minimizing their tax burden. That occupies a lot of their thought.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Are the bananas still free, Jeff?
Your in-depth counter argument, with detailed refutations of his each and every point, was truly incredible.
in all the gushing about Amazon raising their salary minimum, nothing is said about their employee turnover numbers??????
Did you bother reading the material at the link you quoted? Here are the highlights:
1). As such, bonuses (like other supplemental wages) are treated differently than ordinary wage or salary income when it comes to taxes *withheld at payout*.
2). Remember, taxes may be withheld from your bonus at a higher tax rate at payout, but when you file your taxes at tax time your actual tax rate is based on your total taxable income and overall actual tax rate, which may be lower.
In other works, withholding might be based on 25%, but when you figure your taxes for the year, if you're in the 15% bracket, you're only taxed 15% of the bonus. In other words, that extra 10% contributes toward overpayment of taxes upon which you would get a refund.
they goal here is to get the two classes of workers (hourly and salaried) fighting among themselves and prevent them from Unionizing.
/.'s audience is and how many layoffs we've all been through that nobody else seems to have pointed this out.
:(...
I"m actually annoyed that, given how old
It usually works. Here's hoping it fails for a change. A guy like Bernie can keep it from happening, but we need a new Bernie. The one we have is pretty old
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I was talking to an Amazon employee today who said it appears that they are definitely performing a compression of lower range employee salaries to implement this minimum - as I would expect.
What this means is that their lowest paid workers will be raised to $15 / hour. Others paid more than that will likely be raised to higher than that. So, for example, someone making $10 / hour might go to $15 and someone making $13 / hour might go to $17.
The employee had no idea how high the salary compression would go, but presumably, there is a stopping point. Perhaps someone at $25 / hour will still get $25 / hour and everyone under some ceiling of the compression range will get something depending on how close they are to that ceiling.
This makes sense because positions that make more should still make more, and it avoids throwing away rewards given for performance and experience.
The employee I spoke to was making closer to $20 / hour and is expecting that this will result in a raise.
Given the current environment, there is a very good strategic reason to do this now other than the publicity advantages.
We are at or very close to full employment. Many retail businesses near me are already having much greater difficulty finding employees and turnover is climbing. The holiday season is approaching. There will be a severe crunch this holiday season to staff seasonal employees.
Amazon has just made a very aggressive grab for those seasonal employees. Other retail businesses already in deep trouble will likely not be able to match this new pay scale. If the crunch is as deep as expected, some employers will likely not be able to find necessary staff. This could represent the final straw for weaker competitors.
No, seriously. We are all sceptical of the large scale disruption Amazon is bringing about and yet we all enjoy it. Nice to hear that Bezos isn't all Manchester capitalism about it. I figure he thought I'd I'm going to start large scale philanthropy with my obscene amounts of money, might as well start with some basics for my workers.
Nice. Well done.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I'd rather have a higher base salary and less bonuses, than lower base salary and higher bonuses. That's because bonuses are never guaranteed.
This seems like a win for Amazon employees.
When will leftists learn that trying to raise the minimum wages doesn't work?
In most businesses, the things that reduce productivity are screw-ups by management, not by the people actually doing the work.
Oh please, I've been in many situations where it's very clear that it's the "doer" at the lowest level that is lazy and/or incompetent, both in software development and elsewhere
It is an amazing thing, but incompetent managers who screw up always put the blame on the people who work for them. Funny, they never admit they screwed up.
The phrase "the people who work for me were lazy and/or incompetent" is pretty much the signature of an incompetent manager.
What was once Hewlett-Packard eliminated bonuses, profit sharing and stock options to give no raises.
We didn't see that in the news.