Tag: bonuses

I Built This PrisonExcerpt: Ozark‘s Wendy Byrde Negotiates Her Compensation


I Built This Prison,  Part I – Etiology of Crime, Chapter 3 – Delusions of Entitlement and Misconfusion of Rewards:

“In the episode 1.6 of Netflix’s original ‘Ozark’, desperate for money Wendy Byrde charges at her boss with an attempt of hostile earnings renegotiation (she is a pushy bird that Wendy Byrde, so it goes with the character). She notes that the sales are up 43% compare to the same month the previous year, while the only business change that took place was her hiring. Hence, she deserves a bonus that would correlate her compensation with her value(‼). Specifically, 50% of the income increase. They haggle and at the end the boss agrees to the bonus that together with Wendy’s salary amounts to one-third of the additional profits.

Fiction, of course. But, if the employers were actually inclined to evaluate and compensate their employees based on their tangible contribution into their businesses, the negotiations like that would be a common place. And maybe they are… somewhere. But I’ve never really witnessed anything like that. Well, something of the kind – once, fifteen years ago. But that was it.  

Of course, these are not exactly “negotiations” either. Wendy gives her boss an ultimatum because she has an upper hand – there is no comparable supply of labor in that God forsaken bumblefuck locale. There is like literally no one to do the same job – not on a half-ass, or quarter-ass, or even one-hundredth of an ass level. And so, her boss is not rewarding her for her contribution, he yields under the pressure of unfavorable market conditions.

An unimaginable situation for NYC (and I’m sure the same goes for all industrial centers), no matter what your field of expertise is! Here, an employer – even the one that is afraid out of his mind to lose you – deep inside knows that if you walk, he can find at least Somebody to fill the void. You, on the other hand, may drown in the competition searching for another place.”

                                                                                                                          p.40

Boss Joke of the Month: Raises and Bonuses


Grinch stole my raise and bonusAh, January!  Traditionally, a month of raises and bonuses!  Or, at least it used to be.  You probably have read many an article and a blog post about the diminishing slew of companies still giving out performance bonuses and/or raises. 

I am not surprised – I am the one always going on and on about the illusional nature of the "economic recovery" tune so "earnestly" whistled by politicians and business media.  Companies, big and small, are struggling left and right.  In the absence of profits, merit is kicked off its, already pathetic, backseat all the way into the trunk: When a company experiences business losses you may need to work twice as hard as you did during more prosperous times, but it will not get you matching rewards.  In fact, big enterprises frequently present their employees with a more contemporary version of a performance reward: take a pay cut or a demotion for the sake of keeping your job.

But not the young company X! 

Company X had difficult 2011 and 2012, experiencing all sorts of growing pains and deformities, but 2013 was, if not a spectacular, but a pretty-pretty good year: the business outperformed its forecaststs both at the Gross and the Net Profit levels.  And so, in accordance with formal evaluations conducted at the end of the year, the Board of Directors decided that effort-based bonuses will be paid and raises will take effect as of January 2014.

Now, like many small and mid-size companies, X uses ADP as their payroll service provider.  So, in order to implement raises, an Administrator has to go into ADP's online system and change employees' pay rates.  X's CFO is very anal about being above suspicions: she has set up the payroll administrative functions in a way that allows her to change everybody's compensation items, except her own.  She left that prerogative to the owner/CEO.

Unfortunately that means getting the boss to do something outside of her comfort zone: Of course, she doesn't remember her login ID and password for the Payroll Administration portal.  Plus, any reminder of the compensation negotiations puts her in a vile mood.  Plus, a rate per pay periods, a special bonus batch…  It's all too much.  Never mind that she only needs to do that for ONE PERSON, her CFO! 

CFO is very aware, though.  She makes it as simple as possible, cutting the instructions for CEO into small pieces and chewing them into a pulp that can be fed through an IV.  She puts it in writing too, via email: 

"My base salary was $A per year.  You gave me a raise of Y%, which amounts to $B.  My new base salary, therefore, is $C per year ($A + $B).  Accordingly, please change my semi-monthly payroll rate from current $a ($A/24) to $c ($C/24).  Thank you."

In two hours our CFO receives CEO's response:

"Dear N,

Please double check your current pay and the number after raise.  Also, I will have to do it on Monday, because I need to leave now to pick up my son."

Really?!  CFO looks at the email and in her mind she imagines writing back something like: "Bitch, are you telling me that I don't know how much you underpay me?  Or that with an MS in Finance, MBA in Accounting, and a PhD in Economics I cannot do simple arithmetic?  And why the fuck I, of all people,  am supposed to wait for my fucking raise?  I just set you up with one, even though my daughter is waiting for me!  What the fuck?!"

But CFO is not writing anything: she knows only too well that CEO didn't mean malice – she is just that stupid, dense, and lazy.  It's insults CFO's intelligence to work for someone like that.  But what are you going do?  At least in this place they give out raises and bonuses.