Sociologist Elise Penalva-Icher, author of Salary Frustration. What are the bonuses used for? (Sorbonne Université Presses, 224 pages, 20 euros), explains that remuneration positions the employee within the company. Properly understanding one’s salary is an issue for employees, on a personal level, but also in relation to other employees.
Remuneration has gained in diversity over the past thirty years. What underlies this phenomenon?
Elise Penalva-Icher: We are indeed seeing a movement towards individualization and complexity of remuneration, which can take different forms (individual performance bonuses, profit-sharing, participation, etc.).
While the phenomenon is not new (worker wages, for example, have included a variable portion for a long time), we have witnessed a massification of these practices since the 1990s – with, of course, nuances depending on the sector. activity or employee profiles. It is a movement which mainly concerns executives, but which can also affect other employees. Some organizations, for example, pay employee savings at all levels of the hierarchy.
Why are we observing such an evolution? Companies have long believed that bonuses will encourage employees to work harder and better. They constitute, in short, a carrot. But companies also have other motivations in mind, more recent uses.
These bonuses can, for example, aim to attract candidates or retain young employees. Their distribution can also send a negative signal and a mark of stigmatization: not issuing them is a way of putting employees “in the closet”. This is a strategy that is particularly deployed towards seniors.
This increasing variability makes it more difficult to read the salary…
This is a real problem for employees: many of them no longer know precisely how much they earn. Some elements added to the salary do not have a monthly temporality, others are particularly technical.
However, a good understanding of one’s salary is an issue for employees. This on a personal level, in order to understand how much we perceive for ourselves. But also on a more relative level, compared to other collaborators. Remuneration positions the employee within the company. And it is also, more broadly, an indicator of social stratification. Faced with bonuses which confuse the reading of the pay slip, there is therefore a real demand for salary transparency.
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