The Art of Conjury
Now don't get me wrong: I appreciate the coming bonus of 5% of my base salary*, in light of the pay freeze I reluctantly signed up to for the good of the company. My bonus will be about $5,000. My salary is middle of the road relative to my colleagues. It is reported that the staff bonus will cost the company $90 million. I don't think anyone can deny the generosity*.
* Subject to approval at the AGM.
But when compared to the rumours of the $50,000 bonuses the ops managers (an essentially redundant and unnecessary layer of management in Engineering) have received, and the CEO's bonus of $9.8 BLOODY MILLION it bloody-well PALES in comparison!
AJ's bonus I can understand: conflate a non-existent crisis, convince the media of its veracity, explore the boundaries of truthfulness in a Senate inquiry, create an enormous paper loss with one huge write-down after failing to reguarly review the value of the assets... etc etc etc. He's had a proper pash of the blarney stone and for such a monumental hoodwinking of government, regulator and media he probably come close to deserving every cent.
But how can this company justify a managerial bonus 10 times greater than tht of the people they manage? Has anyone actually measured what they add to the business to justify such a bonus?
Now, let's extrapolate from the lowest of the low level of management up to the CEO, counting up every single person in the org structure with "manager" in their title. It's a headcount that comes to thousands. Then apply a bonus that one must assume gets multiple times bigger than the level below it.
What do we think the sum total of those bonuses are?
I'm sure they'll be structured in such a way that they can be buried in the Annual Report to not reflect their true cost to the company.
Absolutely shameless.