Everyone's Getting a Bonus, Why Not Me?

Dear Stanley,
I worked for a consulting company as an analyst for two years and worked my way up the pay grade. Recently I switched jobs by joining a corporate advisory firm. On my first day of work, the company announced that the firm got bought by a financial services company. The end result is that every one else will get a bonus and I will not! Our bonus is broken into two components: 1) performance and 2) a retention bonus for all staff because of the acquisition, which is applicable to all employees who have been with the firm since the day before I joined. Should I explore trying to get a bonus with my boss and HR?
Transition Thomas

Dear Thomas,

Wow, you're in the thick of it, right on the leading edge of a number of thorny trends. I'm going to tell you something I think perhaps you don't want to hear. Dude ... you haven't earned a bonus. Why should you get one? Yeah, I know you want one, and perhaps under your old deal you were entitled to one, but why should you get one? Your bonus is broken into two parts. Let's look at them.

The first is for performance. You've been there about five minutes. Should you be rewarded for the excellence of your performance during that time? If you go to HR, what will they say? I'm betting they'll say, "Gosh, this guy has chutzpah. Everybody else is worried about losing their jobs after the acquisition, and he's here to ask for a bonus for work he's done since last Thursday. Hasn't he ever heard of the old rule that says the last one hired should be the first one fired?" Anyhow, that's what I'd be thinking if I were in HR, which, thank God, I'm not.

Part two of your deal involves the corporation's desire to keep people in place during a transition period following a divestiture or acquisition. Thanks to the moral morons at AIG, the whole subject of retention bonuses has been tainted. They are not, in themselves, a stupid or unethical thing. I know because after my old company was sold a few years ago, I received a modest one. It made it feasible for me and my friends at our divested division to stick around for a year to do the things that truly needed doing -- selling off assets, concluding or transferring contracts, and making sure the wheels didn't fall off during the transition period. If we hadn't received the extra money, we would all have been out the door immediately, and the value of the asset would have gone into the chute. What AIG seems to have done -- incredibly -- is paid a bunch of supposed "retention bonuses" to guys who had already left! I'm sure they have a rationale of some kind. Insurance people always do. But it seems truly ridiculous.

So what about your place? Does it matter to them yet if you stay or if you go? If it does, you can go to HR and say, "Hey, I know I just got here, but the whole terms of my employment have been tossed into the air by this acquisition. I understand there is some retention money around to make people feel better about hanging in here. I know it sounds very presumptuous of me after so short a time on the block, but I wonder whether there might be something in that coffer to make me feel better about my recent job move to your lovely corporation?" I wouldn't do it, by the way. I'd hunker down and be good at my new job. But you sound like a greedy fellow and very much in tune with your profession of financial consulting. So maybe you should go for it. Good luck.