Not surprised really.
http://www.autonews.com/article/2016...-significantly
VW is part owned by a State in Germany, and they want bonus dropped totally.
(it's like Dagenham Council owning half of Ford, and with less profits coming in, cutting Ford bonus)
The Unions want a change too
To put it into context, Poetch is due a bonus of 11million Euros.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/bertelsc.../#4aaaea5c4c94
Originally Posted by Advice Trinity by Knoxville
if you wanted to be accurate, its more like if ford were a British company, its shares were mostly owned in england and Essex Council (which doesn't exist to the best of my knowedge) owned 12.4%.
and given the State of Saxony have 20% voting rights, they're gonna need some friends to force this one through.
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What has VW's executive done to deserve bonuses? Bonuses are meant to reward good performance - in the last 12 months VW has racked up billions in fines, sullied their brand, and possibly killed the future of diesel in Europe. Good job have 11 million Euros?
Collectively, nothing. Individually, that's harder to say.
But while those responsible for doing that, and those supervising them, deserve what they get, the odds are that quite a lage percentage knew nothing about it.
A lot will probably depend on what contracts say. If my contract says I get x% bonus if I meet this and that target, and I meet them, I'm going to expect to get my x% and not have it cut because someone else in a completely different area messed up, and badly. Why should I be punished for their misdeeds?
On the other hand, if my contract says I get x% if I meet this and that target, and the company achieves a certain profit figure, then even if I meet my targets, I don't get my bonus if the company doesn't meet that profit level.
Lots of staff have contracts where bonuses are legally enforceable.
Even individually if the company has that bad a year they shouldn't get a bonus, especially the top management team. The point is always made that the company culture is driven from the top, its one of the main reasons given for such high pay, but when things go wrong its always somebody else's fault, they didn't know, etc.
I have worked places that give high sales bonuses that are still paid even when things are not going well for manufacturing side, sounds like a good idea to try and keep sales up to drive the manufacturing, problems is that the sales team can make promises manufacturing cant keep, which can cause problems for future sales, and means that manufacturing fails to meet its target and misses out on a bonus. Have also been in a discussion where R&D asked for a separate bonus structure, the people involved couldn't see that their work directly affected manufacturing. Its great coming up with new ideas, but it often takes a very good engineering and scientific team to design them for manufacture.
the top man stepped down when that emissions stuff broke. hes paid with his job, he aint gonna take a bonus. the new man who has steered them through it, maybe he deserves a bonus. for a start, many commentators saw the break up of VW as a group due to this. hes successfully staved that off.
many people myself included assumed lots of other manufacturers were doing the same thing and would get caught. that hasn't transpired and yet the furore has still gone away. maybe he deserves his bonus?
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I think the furore has far from gone away. Another senior scalp last month, an ever increasing investigation, and the increasing prospect of a huge forced buyback of cars in the US. Recently a class action was started against VW to reclaim some of the resale value of the cars which VW have made pretty much worthless and citing the "clean diesel" advertising campaign as now provably false.
http://arstechnica.co.uk/cars/2016/0...-can-be-fixed/
Morally, I'm certainly inclined to agree on top management. But at lower levels, even morally it ought to be more about whether individuals, or business units, met their targets.
I also take the point about sales targets. It long has been the case that great care has to be taken with sales targets in all sorts of ways, and poorly designed targets have been the source of all sorts of problems if the salesman gets paid on 'sale' regardless of the nature of the deal. I spent several years, some decades back, in 'pre-sale support' for a major computer manufacturer. The client-facing role was two-fold :-
- ensure the salesman is backed up with technical support, but also
- ensure the sslesman doesn't commit the company to anything not in it's interests.
I had one salesman determined to make a given sale by a given date, because he got a freebie to a sales 'conference' in a beach resort in Thailand if he did, that he wanted several million quids worth of hardware installed with a beta OS, when the final release was due in about a month. Because the equipment was going in front-of-house roles in a bank, it would have meant a supplier techie, probably me, manually upgrading every machine, in every branch, across a large chunk of the company. And because these were live counter machines, in securecareas of banks, it'd need a member of the bank's IT staff with me. I reckon it would have kept me, and the bank's IT guy, on the road for several months, non-stop. All because some sales idiot wanted a week on the beach. He was not happy when I pointed out the implication to the bank. On that occasion, the "sale" for the salesman occurred when the rollout started for a given branch, rather than signature, because it was a multi-year program.
But in the general case, most large businesses are made up of multiple units almost cspable of being individual businesses. Even for a motor manufacturer, and obvious distinction is car and commercial vehicles. As long as the company actually has the money, I don't see why staff in one part, where individuals did everything expected of them to qualify for a bonus, should be denied it because others didn't. At an individual level, bonuses might be about individual performance against targets, or team, business unit or company performance, but if you meet the target you should get the bonus due. A person might then get his personal bonus, but not a company profit bonus if it doesn't make a profit.
On a different note, personally I have a problem with some of the spectacularly large bonuses the very top executives like to mutually award themselves. The obvious examples are bankers but others, most recently BP, are at it too. We just might currently be seeing a shareholder backlash, especially from institutional shareholders, which in my opinion is very badly overdue.
But while that's a "bonus", it's a very different issue to the bulk of a workforce getting a few hundred quid, maybe a couple of grand, as a bonus.
from your article:
Horn is not currently a suspect in any of the ongoing investigations probing VW’s emissions scandal.
define pretty much worthless? ive seen very little dip in the value of vw group vehicles over here. obviously i dont monitor the market in the states.
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Sure he isn't being investigated by the authorities, but I think he could have done a much better job at damage control when the brown stuff did hit the fan.
Still, if he is anything like the old CEO who "paid with his job" and got a 3.2M Euro handshake and a 1M Euro per year pension he will do nicely *and* gets to leave his mess to someone else to clean up. Wish I could get that sort of treatment if I messed up.
Perhaps worthless was a bit strong, but in a market where only 3% of cars sold are diesel and petrol is a much cheaper fuel to buy than diesel people don't have to get that nervous to decide that diesel is a risk they don't need. So yes in this country the value hasn't dropped, but it seems that in the US VW were handing out $1000 compensation to owners for the loss in value, but that still won't make the car desirable on the second hand market when you really don't know whether those cars are going to get fixed or bought back by VW and scrapped.
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