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Comment by pktgen | Hacker News Reader

It's very telling that most of the announcements of benefits to workers purportedly attributable to the tax cuts are in the form of one-time bonuses. The corporate tax cuts are ongoing; the bonuses to workers are one-time. These are nothing more than PR moves. Moreover, the headlines are misleading in some cases; for example, Walmart's touted "$1,000 bonus" was actually $200-$1,000 depending on years of service. Only workers with 20+ years of service are getting $1,000.

There have been a few announcements of actual wage increases that corporate PR departments have tried to attribute to the tax cuts, but in every one I've looked at, it was clear the wage increase was just the result of normal market forces and dressed up to pretend it was the result of tax cuts. For example, a few banks (including Wells Fargo) announced a minimum wage increase to $15/hour, but Bank of America announced that same change at the end of 2016, before any tax cuts.

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> These are nothing more than PR moves.

They’re certainly good for PR, and perhaps that’s the primary intention, but employees are benefitting from it.

Sure, but throwing large amounts of tax breaks at corporations in the hopes that a few scraps will trickle down to workers as PR efforts is inefficient. There are much more efficient ways of achieving even better outcomes for workers.

Right, but imagine if instead, they gave them a raise instead of a one time bonus? That is how you actually benefit workers.

Raises are likely to be more useful to employees than bonuses, particularly over the long term. These bonuses don’t preclude the possibility of more bonuses down the road, however. It’s unclear at this point exactly how things are going to shake out along those lines.

Walmart employs about 2.3 million people. At $1000 per employee that's $2,300,000,000 going back into the economy.

Now, if Walmart gave everyone who worked there a $1 raise. With about 1.5 million full-time employees working around 1700 hours per year (US average 2016) that would mean about $2,550,000,000. So that bonus is almost equivalent to a temporary raise in terms of benefits.

That is just for full-time employees. A blanket $1 raise would probably come out to about $4,000,000,000 each year that Walmart may not have if the tax cuts are removed by the next administration, which they very well could be.

Walmart has said that the bonuses will cost $400M, so that's not $2.3B going into the economy. Only some employees are eligible for a $1,000 bonus: some will receive between $200 and $1,000, and employees who earned less than $11/hour prior to the raises are not eligible for a bonus.

> It's very telling that most of the announcements of benefits to workers purportedly attributable to the tax cuts are in the form of one-time bonuses.

It's sad that it's one time. It was probably the quickest way to reward people around the holidays. For many it's a few car payments and maybe a month worth of rent. Yeah it is peanuts for anyone living in on the coasts or writing software or both.

> Only workers with 20+ years of service are getting $1,000.

Walmart wasn't the only company which did it. Sure it was a PR stunt just as much, and it would be nicer to have other things like universal healthcare, but at this point that's a nice fantasy and this is something that made people's live better.

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