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Comment by charwalker | Hacker News Reader

If a company receives federal aid, or their employees receive federal aid due to low pay ex Walmart in the US, they should have to cap payouts. Maybe based on a ratio to the lowest paid employee or federal minimum wage. Make execs lobby to raise the minimum wage so they can increase their bonus or something.

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> Maybe based on a ratio to the lowest paid employee or federal minimum wage. Make execs lobby to raise the minimum wage so they can increase their bonus or something.

Using the lowest paid employee ratio results in companies outsourcing the low pay jobs so that this ratio looks better. For example janitorial jobs.

Don't give up so easy. Let there be a contract defining a minimum wage that companies can sign up for. Then forbid tier 3 companies from outsourcing anything to tier 1 or doing work for tier 5.

Alternatively the law can be written so that the multiplier is against the greater of (1) the lowest paid domestic employee, or (2) the prevailing wage of the lowest paid foreign employee if they were domestically employed. Something like that, anyways.

They can use multiple levels of indirection to skirt these laws. Form a separate legal entity or contract a company that contacts another company that employs the low income workers. Just too many ways to skirt the problem. Just simply mandate livable wages.

Fatalism is the best way.

It's overly simplistic but I'd try to change things such that:

- if the company is asking for aid or corporate welfare, bonuses for any exec are off the the table. They have to lead by example and take hit, as leaders, before anyone else.

- welfare isn't given to the business directly without strict conditions, and in other ways it is given directly to everyone through payroll.

- the government has the backbone to actually enforce this instead of cowering at the mere sight of money.

It should be harder, almost impossible, for a corporation to receive welfare from the government than an individual person.

Take it further, if the execs are directly responsible for the mess they should also pay for it (for starters by handing over their stocks to government) Skin in the game would allow for even larger bonuses.

"The bonuses, meant to offset the salary cuts the management team took in 2020, were distributed while the company was calling for a bailout from Ottawa. The government agreed to the package on several strict terms, including guaranteed refunds for customers and a cap on executive pay.

But the terms of the deal do not apply retroactively. Moving forwards, under the bailout agreement, executive compensation at Air Canada must be capped at $1 million per year until all government loans are repaid."

The government did cap the salaries, I've not done any super deep research but from the articles I've read, I've not been able to figure out how this was allowed.. except this article that mentions that they're not applied retroactively, and that the payout was because the exec team went without salary. Not totally clear in the Canadian press how the whole thing actually panned out at the end of the day. (fwiw: I didn't post my original comment as an opinion on the situation, only that a similar conversation is happening in the Canadian press. :))

https://www.thestar.com/business/2021/06/01/air-canada-paid-....

My understanding is that the bonuses were paid out in the final stages of the negotiations for the bailout package.

Or maybe don't pay any federal aid at all. It rewards bad business, hurts competition and obviously doesn't even work. Instead:

- Give aid directly to the employees who need it instead of relying on the trickle down myth - Buy shares to inject capital into companies as a form of financial aid but get something in return for the people who have to pay for it - Never let companies get big enough that a bailout is necessary in the first place - Let businesses fail and get bought by more competent competitors like the market economy doctrine dictates - Prohibit foreign takeovers

Yes, work it out in bankruptcy. The planes and hotel rooms will still be there and be utilized by stronger folks.

And bailing out cruise lines at taxpayer expense was ridiculous.

In the netherlands, it was mentioned for "no bonuses" as part of the agreement/state aid.

I believe the article clarifies this - the "no bonuses" rule didn't exist when Booking.com claimed this aid.

The rule existed for the second tranche of aid, which Booking didn't claim.

The fact that that even needed to be specified was pretty bad, the money was clearly earmarked for companies to spend on their regular employees to avoid lay-offs. Booking paying it out to their execs was absolutely mis-appropriation in every sense of the word, and only absolutely massive backlash here and significant talk of boycotts, including on national TV, is what turned them around on this.

No doubt;

Nonetheless, this is business as usual.

Booking.com are masters of tax avoidance and I'd guess all of their usual bonuses are essentially covered by Dutch state aid in the form of reduced taxes.

They were misleading the government.

> Het niet uitkeren van bonussen was overigens door het ministerie van Financiën niet als harde eis vastgelegd in de voorwaarden voor de NOW-regeling waar Booking gebruik van maakte. Hoekstra had simpelweg de Kamer laten weten dat het “niet de tijd voor het toekennen en uitkeren van bonussen” is. Wel een harde eis was dat ontvangers van de staatssteun ten minste drie maanden lang niemand mochten ontslaan. Booking hield zich hier exact drie maanden aan, direct erop volgde een reorganisatie waarbij bijna 26.000 mensen hun baan verloren. Dit betrof ook zo’n duizend mensen op het kantoor in Amsterdam, de meesten van hen maakten gebruik van een vrijwillige vertrekregeling.

Correction: I understand it to be a quarter of staff (the total staff being 26000). So the article is pretty grossly wrong in an important and obvious detail. Not sure how much I'd trust it on the more nuanced but.

(Former booking employee here, but not for several years)

Correct. But it was 5000 in Amsterdam and 26k worldwide.

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