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Comment by throwaway9002 | Hacker News Reader

Playtech in London isn't firing but cut all employee salaries by 10% across the board.

The CEO just awarded himself a 30mil bonus: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/playtech-plan-to-pay-boss...

It's more than a little misleading to say that the CEO 'just' did this when the article is from 2019 Dec 4, so before the pandemic.

And it's a gambling company, so I'm sure they have a strong moral compass.

The bonus might not have been paid until this month though, the start of the new financial year

As a Frenchman I can recommend light protests, from home.

Instead of burning a few wooden pallets and having a BBQ while blocking the company entrance, you guys could perhaps put a firewall rule to drop all incoming traffic to the VPN and having an online video party.

> you guys could perhaps put a firewall rule to drop all incoming traffic to the VPN

How could you ever trust an employee who did this with their access privileges?

In France, employees don't earn the trust of the CEO, the CEO earns the trust of the employees.

I don't know how other employees could trust an employee abusing their privileges like that, either.

It's fine if it's a common decision among active employees.

I don't think that's fine at all - seems a terribly unethical thing to do and completely indefensible.

The same could be said about a CEO who cuts everybody with 10% and gets a huge bonus at the same time. I'm not disagreeing with you, though.

It was not at the same time. The bonus was paid in December, before the pandemic.

Thanks, that makes things different. I should've looked better at this particular case!

Regardless of timing or events, the 30mil individual bonus was still taken while 10% of employee's salaries were cut. That's excessive and a slap in the face to those employees.

No-one could have predicted this pandemic and the drastic measures companies have to take. When they paid the bonus they had no idea they would have to cut salaries a few months later. The timing is essential since one event happened before the pandemic and one afterwards. We could argue about bonuses in general but that's a whole different topic.

But perhaps, just perhaps, the CEO could take $2M as bonus and save $28M for a rainy day?

A rainy day will arrive sooner or later - whether it is a pandemic or an economic crisis or a dry spell in additional funding, etc.

I agree but that's a whole different discussion. We can criticize bonuses in general but making this company a particular scapegoat is just wrong.

I am not sure what is so particular about this company that the CEO deserved 30M, while neglecting to have a rainy-day fund, just like any reasonable business should. With 30M of bonus, it does not seem like the company was struggling last year?

I don't think any bonus at that level is deserved but just look at how many healthy companies that apparently didn't have a rainy-day fund and are already struggling.

So the bonus has been returned?

Maybe? The discussion has derailed from a misrepresentation of facts to people holding on to their anger and finding unrelated ways to slander the company. They gave a bonus, then corona hit and they had to cut salaries, like so many other companies have.

If you ask me I think all bonuses should be returned but again, nothing uniquely evil about this company.

Hurting the company is the point of this kind of protests, but you shouldn't do it alone with your company credentials for sure.

Some employers may want to fire the people who organize the protests, but in France the employees representatives are more protected than others and you can't fire them easily. It has pros and cons.

How protected is this kind of direct action? If it's ok to disrupt the company's services is it also ok to disclose or destroy customer data? Where does the law draw the line?

I've heard about workers in France literally kidnapping and stripping the clothes from their bosses and it being tolerated. I think that kind of thing is never tolerable under any civil circumstance. If a co-worker tried to kidnap me I'd see that as a threat to my life and I'd be fighting for survival.

You cannot be fired if you protest in a reasonable way yes. Disclosing or destroying customer data is not acceptable no. I'm not a law expert so I cannot tell you were the line is. I guess nobody really knows precisely.

Kidnapping is for sure not acceptable. Stripping the clothes as well, it was very criticized everywhere in the world including France when the AirFrance HR cunt got his shirt destroyed. If you work in France in the future, don't be scared about being kidnapped by your co-workers. It's very unlikely, especially if you are not a bad CEO, and I don't remember physical harm happening. I'm not saying it's acceptable, but it's a very small risk and you should not dismiss the benefits of protesting for only a few protests that went wrong over the last 10 years.

> and it being tolerated

Well the persons responsibles for stripping the Air France HR guy got 3 to 4 months jail sentences, so I don't know if I would call that "tolerated".

At the same time, in the US there's litterally an idiom for starting to kill your coworkers if I'm correct : "going postal".

So, overall, I prefer the most violent thing to happen at work to be shirt stripping.

How could you ever trust an employer who cuts salaries, but awards themselves a bonus?

The bonus was paid in December.

YMMD

Well... That's an overhyped media headline. In reality it is a stock based compensation over the next 5 years, based on performance of the stock price, capped at a maximum of 30 million. So it was already very unlikely he was going to get 30m (= 6 per year) pre-crisis. And given the current stock market he is probably going to get nothing for the coming two years or longer.

> based on performance of the stock price,

Lulz, classic case of bad incentive: I bet revenues for online gambling are way up at the moment, now that more and more people are forced to stay home and be fundamentally unsupervised all day. But because stock markets are drying up across the board, stellar profits might well not get reflected in stock prices.

Just another reason for not basing exec compensation on stock prices.

It depends on the type of gambling. Sports based gambling has basically disappeared. Bingo/slots/casual games are up in general I think.

Good point - I was thinking card games really, and it's true that most sports betting is currently frozen - although there are reports that minor leagues (which are still running in some countries) are being heavily targeted by desperated punters and gambling orgs.

> cut all employee salaries by 10% across the board

How does that work exactly? I imagine you're presented with a contract that says "you salary is now <previous salary 0.9>"* and you're also told (or heavily implied) that if you don't sign, you're fired.

Surely the employer can't just start paying you less than specified in your original contract? And maybe if you don't sign, you're owed some benefits (but who wants to be jobless going into pandemic+recession+inflation)?

Yes they just say take pay cut or we make you redundant because we cannot afford you.

If you have evidence that the redundancy is a direct result of you not taking a pay cut, then it's illegal and you can take them to a tribunal.

It still happens though.

Yes, if you decide not to sign the new contract, and they fire you because of it, you can take them to tribunal for it. It's illegal.

IANAL but it's not always illegal. If a company has a choice between going bust and imposing pay cuts on everyone then that is perfectly legal.

If they follow the procedure in the UK, they can do this AFAIK. Though, they might need to make the position redundant and offer another position at a lower wage. Either way, it's a contract change.

Claiming someone is redundant and then hiring someone else to do essentially the same job, but on worse terms and probably with a different job title or other deceptions to try to disguise what you're really doing, is a trick as old as the sun. UK employment lawyers and tribunals are likely to laugh you out of the building with an expensive lesson if you try it.

Noone does that.

What large companies do is hold a large minority stake in their group companies. Then they shut down the 'programme' in one company and move it, modulo some cosmetic changes, to another group company.

Bitter experience.

Indeed. Larger businesses in the UK do have additional obligations when it comes to redundancies, but the system isn't perfect, for sure.

Citation very much needed. I have never seen anything in UK employment rights law that says "unless the employer is in trouble".

If the business is in danger of going bust because it can't afford to keep people on then it may need to make some of them redundant (and redundancy rights will then apply), but that's totally different to unilaterally changing the contractual terms of employment for the worse.

I believe s.98(1)(b) of the Employment Rights Act 1996 [1] allows dismissal for "some other substantial reason" which could be argued to cover this scenario and there is some case law such as Garside and Laycock Ltd v Booth [2]

[1] http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1996/18/section/98 [2] https://www.bto.co.uk/blog/refusing-to-accept-a-wage-cut-%E2...

Thanks for the interesting source material.

It appears that the case in question has not yet been definitively resolved, though, and the argument made would contradict almost everything many employment lawyers have been advising for a long time about the implications of the ERA in this area. Notably, that includes a lot of advice given during the previous financial crisis just over a decade ago, when similar questions were widespread.

The conventional legal wisdom seems to have been that mandating a pay cut is not allowed, because it's not a permitted deduction from wages and it's likely a breach of contract, and that firing someone just for refusing is not allowed either, because any decisions about who to let go if the business is in financial trouble are a separate matter that should be made objectively. That would mean without reference to the refusal by any given employee to accept worse terms of employment, and without conflating a position that might now be redundant with any employee currently holding that position who might also be able to work elsewhere in the business instead.

Corporate looting on the cusp of a recession. Classy

Wow, I didn't think any developed country allowed employers to legally cut an employees salary.

If the alternative is getting laid off, I'm happy to accept the cut as I did last week.

That is standard in Germany. For a period of upto 12 months during emergencies, employees contracts can be reduced to x% (for x % hours), the govt will cover the remaining money (upto 60% of net salary). Its called shotrt-term work or kurzarbeit.

That also exists in France (and is currently used extensively) but it's very different from reducing salaries.

Employee must agree. Most do with their initial contract or because of unions, though.

That's happening in all modern countries right now and the correct way to combat this downturn instead of letting companies go bankrupt or do layoffs. Do your research and you will see that this is not controversial at all.

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