Tata Steel’s collective labor agreement states that the employees receive a fixed percentage of the company’s profits. “At a good year it’s sometimes a six, seven, eight, percent bonus, and once it was even nineteen percent I believe, but this won’t happen again anytime soon,” Rob Wanst, chairman of one of Tata’s works councils, told NH News. “The flat screens will be flying out the doors around here in the near future.”
“The high profit is largely due to the high steel prices and to your efforts,” writes Tata’s board of directors in a letter to its employees.
The blast furnaces came under a lot of scrutiny last year because of harmful emissions and the attempts to regreen, for which the company needs subsidy, but the bonus is separate from that, says Cinta Groos, chairman of the central works council at the company. “This is part of the terms of employment and they have been there since 1995. Some companies have a thirteenth month and we do not,” Groos told NH Nieuws. “With this condition, everyone at Tata Steel shares in the profit. If there is, then eh, sometimes it’s just nothing. There is a formula for calculating the bonus percentage, but in short: because the profit is now large, the bonus payment is also high.”