Bonus or bogus?

Management recently presented Paris trade unions with an overview of the 2023 promotion and bonus campaign. The good news: management promoted more people than required. The bad news: an inequality of treatment in the awarding of one-shot bonuses.

While SUD has ferociously defended our wage scales and the career plans that ensure automatic promotion to higher echelons against the trend towards the individualization of remuneration, we’ve never contested management’s right to award one-shot bonuses.

Management conducts a promotion and bonus campaign every year (applied the following March) that recognizes employees who have particularly invested or distinguished themselves in their work.

Only that we’ve gotten the impression that management has abused its discretionary power by allowing an inequality of treatment to emerge. Every year management provides us with an overview of the promotion and bonus campaign, and we got information about the 2023 campaign in June.

The table above, compiled by SUD using the information provided by management, shows an inequality of treatment in the awarding of one-shot bonuses. When questioned by SUD, management insisted it had the right to favor one category over another. For example, to compensate for the complete lack of bonuses for Ouvriers des transmissions. But it never really justified the difference in treatment. Management also rejected our demand to ensure a certain balance between categories over the medium term.

The information above concerns only staff on HQ-status contracts. We only received the overall budget for local staff bonuses for 2023: 99,000 euros.

One could, justifiably, point out that journalists have a much better career plan. But SUD believes that we shouldn’t fall into the trap of using one-shot bonuses, irregular and awarded at the whim of management, to compensate for low wages and inadequate career plans. These problems are linked to the problems of our 2017 workplace agreement. One-shot bonuses are to recognize employees, in all categories, for their efforts.

This situation can’t last! We must push for wage hikes and improvements to the career plans for all categories during the upcoming annual wage negotiations (NAO). Management recently agreed to eliminate the lowest echelons in the wage scales of the Employés de presse and Ouvriers des transmissions which had fallen below the minimum wage in our sector. That’s good, but we need to go further, particularly for the Employés de presse whose career plan is no longer attractive, and wages are the lowest.

We can no longer give management carte blanche on one-shot bonuses. SUD demands trade unions are consulted on the budget and attribution criteria for one-shot bonuses in order to ensure a balance between the different professional categories. We also expect management to honor its promise to introduce a system to ensure that the bonuses are not awarded to the same people year after year now that the new HR and payroll software has been deployed.

SUD counts on staff mobilizing during the 2024 NAO, which begins in September, to push for improvements to our purchasing power and countering inequalities inside AFP.

SUD-AFP (Solidarity-Unity-Democracy)