So I’m not sure but this may be semantics. If you are say a Sales men at AIG and your job is to sell insurance products, you are paid on a commissions schedule that inclines as you sell more products. It may also and likely has “kickers”. Those kickers may for example be if you sell X number of a specific product, call it Y, you get an extra bonus of $2k. In this case, the employee met the goals, they should get paid the bonus. The fact that AIG is in the toilet is bad news but if they did not stipulate in the agreement that they (AIG) need to be in a particular financial status, then AIG and we are SOL.
Some employees (like me) have a bones plan based on by specific goals & objectives (deliverables) for the year. This bonus for me is worth as much as 25% of my base. However, the company I work for must also achieve certain revenue & net margin requirements. If either I or the company fail to meet those requirements, I get no bonus. So this year, and our physical year ends in June of this year, I will not get any bonus this year and I will have exceeded all my deliverables. So I’m okay with this because that’s the deal I signed up to. But if the company did not have those stipulations on their financial performance, then I would feel and be entitled.
So again, I agree we are entitled to see the structure of these bonus deals since AIG got a bail out. If the employee’s lived up to their end of the bargin, AIG should pay. Let it be a lesson to our government, that next time they may need to figure this out before they get a bail out. Each company should have to disclose the bonus programs as part of the bailout request. In this case, perhaps AIG would have had to go back to each employee and ask them to sign a new agreement. If AIG or any future bail out prospect can’t restructure the bonus programs, then maybe they get no bail out. Don’t know, but this is a mess and our government is to blame.