Different views on dealing with excessive bonusses - July 10, 2009
Ideological differences between countries mark the results of the WageIndicator Web poll on bonuses. The US believes in companies, Latin American countries and Spain tend to rely on unions and other social parties to solve the mess with the corporate bonuses.
What we can say is that only very few people think managers themselves should take action (7%) or that no action is required (8%).
Most people do think excessive bonuses should be dealt with, but who should do it, varies very much from country to country.
In the US, voters still have much trust in their companies ability to clean up their own mess: 50% wants companies to deal with the bonuses. Apart from Belarus (56%) and the Netherlands (39%), most voters in other countries do not believe companies can do this.
While on average 30 percent of the voters believes governments should deal with the task of cleaning up corporate bonuses, most countries neatly sticked to that average. Only in India (42%) trust in their government was well above the average score.
Large differentiator was the option to leave solution up to negotiations between social parties. The average vote of 18 percent for this solution was much lower than those who wanted companies (36%) or governments (30%) to do the job. In Spain (50%), Argentina (53%), South Africa (37%), Chili (47%)and Colombia (67%) were well above the average, perhaps suggesting a stronger syndicalist tradition in those countries.
Striking were the differences in participation in the polls. In the Netherlands the number of votes went through the roof, also compared with earlier web polls. In many other countries people could not be bothered to fill in the poll and some we actually had to skip, because of the low participation rate.
Meanwhile, a new web poll has been put on the international site and a larger number of national sites, asking what your prefer in the case of cost reduction, hand in a part of your salary, or see some colleagues leave.
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The WageIndicator is an international, continuous web-based operation now in 45 countries. It provides free, accurate wage data through Salary Checks on national WageIndicator websites. It collects wage data through web surveys. Please note that, in contrast to our scientifically based Salary Checks, the results of our web polls are not scientifically tested.
