No, I don't see how it is morally acceptable to make so much money from the efforts of those that you employ and not make sure that they share in the bounty. I know they have good benefits but we are seeing top notch profit and success and employee compensation should see that as well. They are the company, they are Apple, they are the ones who make it happen.
Yeah, and they get paid top notch compensation packages as well. Profits are for shareholders, not for employees, not even executives. It just so happens that executives and in Apple's case, thousands of Apple employees, are also shareholders, and reap the benefits of those profits via the shares they own or have options to buy/convert.
The point is, a corporate Xmas gift like this is not meant to be a bonus relating to the compensation package they receive. It should not be thought of in that way. I'm sure those who were deemed worthy also received a Xmas/year-end bonus as well.
Retail employees are unfortunately not really relevant to the discussion. Non-managers are mostly students, non-college degree, or part time. I'm sorry, but retail floor work is not "the company," for any company. Even at Apple, turnover at that level is very high due to the nature of the job and the employees who take them. That we are discussing this at retail employee level is silly, really. How do you qualify then? Maybe do it like IKEA?
You know, IKEA recently implemented an annual bonus system similar to what you suggested, gave out a significant portion of its profits to all its global employees, even retail level...but not only did the company need to meet its internal financial goals on a global basis to trigger the bonus, but you had to qualify - I think that you had to have been am employee for an unbroken period of at least five years, worked a certain number of hours, etc. but if you qualified, you got the same amount no matter what level you were at or what department or division. They put the money into your qualified retirement contribution plan, that would a 401k in the US, in Sweden an approved tjänstepension or retirement account, etc. IKEA, like Apple, has an incredibly loyal employee base, and still had only had something like 5,000 employees nationwide in the US qualify last year. I think globally, IKEA paid out an extra $137m total to retirement plans as a result of the program last year.
IKEA is also one of the the largest closely held private corporations in the world, its founder and owner deciding to live in tax exile in Switzerland for 30 odd years before finally returning to his home country and creating a corporate structure designed to avoid paying Swedish corporate and personal taxes, which ended up amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars in back taxes when he finally did return.
My point is that no company is in it for the employees...not really. It is the owners/shareholders it is looking out for. Share the profit? Owners and shareholders would argue, quite rightly, that they are the ones entitled to the profit. The employees have already been compensated for the work they have done, and well, if the joint sum of their work ends up being worth more than they were paid, well that is the whole point, isn't it? If it wasn't that way, the business wouldn't be in business very long, would it?
At what point does the magnitude of the profit reach a level where the concept of that profit being the entitlement of the owners/shareholders become invalid? It is not as if employees are slaves. They enter into a contract with their employers, and sell their labor to them for a mutually agreed sum of money. An employee should not then feel entitled to more than the mutually agreed upon contract, and if he does receive it, no matter how little more, then that should be a welcome surprise, not a source of disgruntlement. Especially if said employee already has some form of incentive-based compensation in their contract, whether that be a 401k matching program or a financial result performance bonus.
Seriously...morally acceptable? There is nothing more morally unacceptable than trying to use guilt and entitlement to argue that a company's profits should be forfeited back to the employees rather than the owners/shareholders, especially when employment and related costs amount to most likely the single largest expense category on the income statement, i.e. where most of the company's money is already going.
stores are exclusive to them. Not always exclusive in design, but things have been changed like the padding on the straps, or length of straps, or compartments have been modified to fix apple devices securely. I know this as a fact.
