So there's this little clause in my contract saying my employer reserves the right to modify my bonus structure at any time. OK, so it's a contract, they do stuff like this. Now my employer is part of a much larger company but a separate arm - but the parent company wants to merge us in to them. And as part of that, they're invoking said clause in my contract. So, you say, an adjustment to how the bonuses are paid? Sounds relatively minor, right?

Wrong.

Without sounding too conceited, I am one of the top agents on my 50-man technical support team, which means I'm taking home the high end of our performance related bonus. That amounts to around 10% of my take-home pay. The project I'm on is one of the best performing projects in said arm of the company, and the arm is one of the best performing areas of the parent.

What the parent company wants to do is make our pay partially, or possibly even wholly, based on company performance nationwide, reducing or eliminating individual performance bonuses. And as of this moment, the parent company as a whole is NOT meeting its performance targets. On top of that they want to make it quarterly instead of monthly, so if they implement this we'll only get a flat basic for two months. That's on top of the fact that their basic is already below the industry average.

We had a meeting about this at work to "communicate" the change to the employees and address any concerns they may have. They apparently wanted to reassure us that everything was going to be okay. What they definitely didn't want to do was answer my question when I asked them if the management were proposing any alternative way of motivating individual effort, because the way their ideas stand, there is no incentive for an agent to do any more than "good enough".

And the place that interviewed me two weeks ago still haven't sent me any form of response whatsoever.

Stay away from me folks, my bad karma might be contagious.