介绍:
特别感谢中南财经政法大学【吕欣欣】同学对文稿听译的贡献！！！
It is the last day of 2015, and officially the end of the year, so it is fitting for us to talk about year-end bonuses today (年终奖). It is a tradition in China for employers to give out a certain amount of bonuses to show their appreciation of the employees’ hard work in the past year.
又到了年底，我们几个没有年终奖的，坐一起纸上谈兵，给大家讲讲年终奖发什么，怎么发。
Laiming: So can you tell us more about the year-end bonuses? When is it usually handed out?
Luo Yu: Well, as usual although we call “year-end bonus” “年终奖”, they’re not necessarily always handed out at the end of year. In some cases they’re given in April or at the beginning of the next year. And usually they’re in a form of cash and a red envelope, but I think that’s more of a traditional way. Sometimes they come in various forms, for example, you will be given a car if you’re top performer of a company, an iPhone, and some eggs as perks and the value may vary from person to person and from organization to organization.
Laiming: Who would want eggs?
Michael: I was just thinking that.
Luo Yu: Definitely, I want to share with you my story. I used to work in SOE【注：国有企业】, right?
Laiming: And you got eggs?
Luo Yu: I got not only eggs but also vegetable, oil, pork and mutton and lamb. Basically it’s a lot of daily necessities and you’ll be given even shampoo and conditioners, especially previously before the anti-graft campaign was taken place, a lot of SOEs and public agencies would like to give the employee the perks as the final award.
Michael: I think if I was given an egg, I think I would have been somewhat insulted by that. I think that to me seems like a bit of a wooden spoon trophy【注：木匙奖，通常颁给比赛的最后一名】, you know, for last place.
Laiming: Yeah, I wanted a car and you guys gave me eggs.
Michael: Yeah it doesn’t look very good, does it?
Luo Yu: But that’s just supplementary and those eggs are organic eggs.
Laiming: Despite all the eggs, the company failed to keep you, so you’re now working for us now. I don’t think everyone gets to receive this year-end bonus.
Michael: I don’t know. This is…I like this Chinese tradition, I must say. This isn’t something that we really do so much in the UK. I mean when you talk about year-end bonuses in the UK, it’s usually you’re talking about maybe people who work in a bank, or in finance, or law or in industry where there’s a lot of money changing hands and people get paid very high salaries. And in a lot of cases, a lot of their salaries come in the form of a bonus which you could argue inadvertently contributed to the financial crisis. But here in China, it seems to be almost everybody will receive some sort of bonus however a bigger…(Not for us, not people in CRI) Oh really, oh dear, oh maybe I should’ve rethought my career move. But I remember when I first came to Beijing and I first started to work there, and I started to work in December, so that’s obviously just before the Chinese new year. I mean I wasn’t expecting to get any sort of bonus at all, coz I didn’t even be working here a few weeks. But you know I did receive a bit of money in a red envelope which…It wasn’t much, but I thought it was quite a nice gesture. I was very touched by that.
Luo Yu: Definitely it’s a gesture that can finally touch your heart. Even you were given not a very big amount of the money and the red envelope, but you still feel very delighted.
Michael: Yeah absolutely I mean it’s not the sort of thing I would ever expect to find…In fact I don’t think before I came to China, I don’t think I’d have ever received any sort of special bonus just for the new year or anything like that. So yeah it’s a Chinese tradition I could definitely get behind.
Luo Yu: Just keep it. It’s our fine tradition.
Laiming: So is there any patterning behind this? Who gets to decide what kind of gifts they give to the employees? I guess it’s usually the boss who gets to decide.
Luo Yu: I think it really varies according to different organizations and corporations. If you work in a private sector, I think usually it’s the human resources department or the boss. I think the boss will have the final say. However if you work in a Chinese state-owned enterprise, they have the department of labour union, and usually it’s labour union or “工会” which is to decide what “年终奖” you will get.
Laiming: I also think what people get from the employers also vary based on the occupations they take. For example people work in, as described by Michael, people work in the finance sector might get more money out of their employers than people work in, say, in the grocery industry who might get just eggs.
Michael: Yeah that would be unfortunate. I would imagine we were talking earlier on about the effect of anti-graft and everything in China and how that might affect the consumption and disposal of wealth. I wonder how much this New Year bonuses will be affected by that. I wonder if maybe instead of giving money, people or organizations might want to give their employees something a bit less overtly to do with wealth and finance. Maybe gifts rather than just money on its own or maybe coupons for supermarket or something like that.
Luo Yu: Right, actually we’ve got have some evidence here. As Michael’s mentioned, if you work in a capital intensive industry, usually you will be given more bonuses and commission. And the size of the year-end bonus largely depends on one’s profession, for example, if you work in finance sector, e-commerce sector, automobile industry and aviation sector you tend to get more when it comes to year-end bonuses.
Michael: But I guess it also… if you’re working for a foreign company as well with an office in China, I guess your year-end bonuses are largely dependent on the performance of the company throughout the year. So we’re seeing here that Volkswagen has reportedly cancelled year-end bonuses this year coz it obviously at the moment got much bigger things to deal with what was the emission scandal that broke earlier on this year. So maybe that’s another thing to take into consideration.
Luo Yu: Definitely, apart from the emission scandal by Volkswagen, if you look at the sales record, the revenue generated by the company in China, I mean this company has been underperforming for at least half a year already. So definitely the company has to consider whether to give their employees year-end bonus or not.
Laiming: There’re also other tricky businesses involving year-end bonuses, for example many employees will wait until they receive their year-end bonus to resign. So apparently that’s quite an attraction for employees to stay employed.
Michael: One thing that I’ve noticed what I’ve heard about the year-end bonuses is especially if you’re working in an industry which isn’t particularly well-paid, maybe you know if you work in domestic help for example, from what I’ve heard actually a lot of these people who don’t get paid very much rely on their year-end bonus. From what I see, it’s almost sometimes maybe an entire month or maybe more, an entire month’s salary as the year-end bonus. And a lot of these people I think use this to then be able to travel to their home to see their families for the Chinese New Year.
Luo Yu: That’s probably one of the strategies to retain the personnel they need by those company because it’s so labour intensive.
Laiming: Ok, there we go. There was discussion on the year-end bonuses which I have a feeling what happened every year on Round Table.
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