One of the contentious issues in the corporate world is the large gap between executive perks and wages of ordinary employees. Board members and company officials often get the lion’s share of the compensation, while salaries of the employee are often just a small percentage of what the executives get. But such is not the case in Porsche Germany.
Object of envy
Workers in many companies across the world would surely envy the 21,000 employees of Porsche Germany who will each receive a bonus of €9,111, or about $9,825. The German carmaker broke sales records in 2016 with $24 billion in revenue, a four percent improvement from 2015 revenue, Mashable reported.
The massive profit from the sales of mostly the Macan and Cayenne models for Porsche Germany came from net sales figures of $17,000 per vehicle sold. However, unlike other corporations which would give the bulk of the profit to its executives, the Deutsche company opted to distribute the profit to all 21,000 staff evenly.
Generous employer
It means the Porsche Germany workers – whether they are engineers, factory workers, janitors, cafeteria staff or senior employees – would each receive the equivalent of $9,825 as their 2016 annual bonus. It is roughly equivalent to 22 percent of the $44,925 average annual wage in Germany in 2015, according to data from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.
Or more than two months’ salary.
It is not the first time that Porsche Germany had shared with its employees a generous amount of annual bonus. In early 2016, the yearly windfall the luxury car brand gave to its workers was €8,911. The grant of such enviable amount of bonuses, besides the automaker being a benevolent company, is also because of the strong labor unions and employee representation on company boards.
Exception to the rule
Their labor unions, called works councils, give the employees the chance to participate in top decision-making in companies such as Porsche Germany. A labor representative elected by workers is part of the group that makes major decisions. Mashable noted that such a system is absent in the U.S. where chief executive officers like Marissa Mayer of Yahoo receive millions in annual bonus, except for 2016, despite the tech giant hemorrhaging financially.
Sales of vehicles in the U.S. is not as robust as in Deutschland which is why Porsche Germany could afford to be generous. The latest report said that General Motors would lay off about 1,100 workers from the third shift of the Lansing Delta Township Plant in May as GM phases out the production of the previous generation GMC Arcadia. It is the second lay-offs in GM in 2017. The first was in January when the third shift at the Lansing Grand River Assembly Plant was cut because of a decrease in vehicle sales.
However, there are exceptions to the rule such as Hilcorp Energy, one of the biggest privately held oil companies in the U.S. based in Texas. In late December 2015, Hilcorp Energy CEO Jeffrey Hildebrand handed each of the 1,381 workers of the company checks of $100,000 as their 2015 bonus as a reward for meeting Hilcorp’s five-year-goal to double the company’s size. Hilcorp and Porsche Germany are companies definitely worth spending one’s lifetime career with.
