Government Motors will pay 48,000 hourly workers $4,000 in bonuses this year. Salaried workers will also be given bonuses.
The AP reported:
General Motors Co. will pay more than $189 million in profit-sharing to 48,000 U.S. hourly workers and millions more in performance bonuses to salaried employees, according to company documents obtained by The Associated Press.
GM will pay most hourly workers more than $4,000 each as compensation for its strong financial performance last year, said a person briefed on the bonuses. The payments come less than two years after the automaker emerged from bankruptcy protection with the help of a huge government bailout. They’re more than double the previous record payment of $1,775 in 1999, at the height of the boom in sales of sport utility vehicles and pickup trucks.
“On the whole, we made tremendous progress last year,” CEO and Chairman Dan Akerson said in an e-mail message to employees announcing the payments on Monday. “With our collective teamwork, this can be just the beginning.”
GM’s 28,000 salaried workers, such as engineers and managers, will get bonuses equal to 4 to 16 percent of their base pay. Fewer than 1 percent will get 50 percent or more; another 3 percent will get from 16 percent to around 50 percent, the person said. GM is not giving annual pay raises.
GM made $4.2 billion in the first nine months of 2010 and is expected to soon announce a fourth-quarter profit. The company needed a $49.5 billion government bailout to survive a mid-2009 bankruptcy filing, and the government still owns 25 percent of GM’s stock. Chrysler, which needed a $12.5 billion bailout, plans to pay bonuses as well. The government owns about 9 percent of Chrysler stock.
