URL fixed
https://apnews.com/35f90ab8cb504922984a09aebae50ec2 The online giant says next month it will end bonuses, which paid workers extra based on their attendance and warehouse productivity, as it boosts its minimum wage. Amazon will also phase out its restricted stock unit program, which gave shares to workers if they stayed with Amazon for a certain amount of years. Amazon says it will replace it with a program next year that will allow workers to buy stock, but didn’t provide details. Amazon.com Inc. says “compensation will be more immediate and predictable” with the changes. The company said its other benefits, such as 401(k) retirement accounts and health insurance, were not changed. Higher hourly is probably more beneficial but it is worth noting the trade off companies choose to make when pressured into higher wages.Amazon made a big splash this week with its $15 an hour minimum wage announcement, but lost in the fine print: Existing warehouse workers will no longer receive stock in the company or collect bonuses.
From the perspective of someone doing a similar job as the ones we are talking about here( that got the wage increase): We've got attendance bonuses at my gig. We've* got them because the wages were so low, nobody was showing up to staff the building. I'd be thrilled if they went away in favor of higher wages. Warehousing is dangerous. With attendance bonuses, if you get hurt on the job, and have to miss a day then you're not simply out that day's wages. You're out a day's wages plus $125 for the week. The end effect is as if your pay rate for the days already worked were retroactively reduced. That's quite the incentive not to report injuries or to work through an illness. We don't have production bonuses at my shop, and I'm not sorry about it. "Productivity bonuses" sound nice, until you realize that we're talking manual labor with little chances for optimization through creativity. It is effectively paying piece work. If you're the sort of person dependent on maximizing their pay this way, I wouldn't look to favorably on your odds to hack it long enough to qualify for that restricted stock unit program. Joints break down. Injuries add up. _____________________________ * When I say "we", I mean newer employees. Turns out selectively offering attendance bonuses is easier to slip in to a workforce than selectively offering higher base pay. It is also turning out to be harder to get paychecks corrected if the bonus is missing on it that week.