It's very telling that most of the announcements of benefits to workers purportedly attributable to the tax cuts are in the form of one-time bonuses. The corporate tax cuts are ongoing; the bonuses to workers are one-time. These are nothing more than PR moves. Moreover, the headlines are misleading in some cases; for example, Walmart's touted "$1,000 bonus" was actually $200-$1,000 depending on years of service. Only workers with 20+ years of service are getting $1,000.

There have been a few announcements of actual wage increases that corporate PR departments have tried to attribute to the tax cuts, but in every one I've looked at, it was clear the wage increase was just the result of normal market forces and dressed up to pretend it was the result of tax cuts. For example, a few banks (including Wells Fargo) announced a minimum wage increase to $15/hour, but Bank of America announced that same change at the end of 2016, before any tax cuts.

> These are nothing more than PR moves.

They’re certainly good for PR, and perhaps that’s the primary intention, but employees are benefitting from it.

Sure, but throwing large amounts of tax breaks at corporations in the hopes that a few scraps will trickle down to workers as PR efforts is inefficient. There are much more efficient ways of achieving even better outcomes for workers.

Right, but imagine if instead, they gave them a raise instead of a one time bonus? That is how you actually benefit workers.

Raises are likely to be more useful to employees than bonuses, particularly over the long term. These bonuses don’t preclude the possibility of more bonuses down the road, however. It’s unclear at this point exactly how things are going to shake out along those lines.

Walmart employs about 2.3 million people. At $1000 per employee that's $2,300,000,000 going back into the economy.

Now, if Walmart gave everyone who worked there a $1 raise. With about 1.5 million full-time employees working around 1700 hours per year (US average 2016) that would mean about $2,550,000,000. So that bonus is almost equivalent to a temporary raise in terms of benefits.

That is just for full-time employees. A blanket $1 raise would probably come out to about $4,000,000,000 each year that Walmart may not have if the tax cuts are removed by the next administration, which they very well could be.

Walmart has said that the bonuses will cost $400M, so that's not $2.3B going into the economy. Only some employees are eligible for a $1,000 bonus: some will receive between $200 and $1,000, and employees who earned less than $11/hour prior to the raises are not eligible for a bonus.

> It's very telling that most of the announcements of benefits to workers purportedly attributable to the tax cuts are in the form of one-time bonuses.

It's sad that it's one time. It was probably the quickest way to reward people around the holidays. For many it's a few car payments and maybe a month worth of rent. Yeah it is peanuts for anyone living in on the coasts or writing software or both.

> Only workers with 20+ years of service are getting $1,000.

Walmart wasn't the only company which did it. Sure it was a PR stunt just as much, and it would be nicer to have other things like universal healthcare, but at this point that's a nice fantasy and this is something that made people's live better.

Relative to the tax savings those companies will enjoy and the fact it's a one time payment instead of salary increase? IIRC Comcast will end up paying about $150 million in bonuses which will only be a fraction of the first year tax savings for them.

If that's what this big hoopla ultimately amounts to then it will be highly disappointing. The fact that we are celebrating $1000 bonuses from corporations that have been enjoying record profits (for the most part) recently is disheartening. Something is better than nothing I guess.

If we are defending $1,000 one-time bonuses, why not just pass a law requiring these companies to pay $1,000 to their workers?

This is a bit of a reductio ad absurdum, but the point here is, what cost are we willing to pay as a society in exchange for the $1,000 one-time bonuses? This hypothetical law would be a terrible precedent for businesses, but would it be worse for the people receiving these bonuses than the actual tax plan?

And in order to answer whether it would or wouldn't, we need to look at the merits of the actual tax plan's substance, not the fact that it has (supposedly) caused people to get $1,000 bonuses.

You seem to have glossed over the poster's main point, which is that many the companies announcing those bonuses, in fact many of the ones you've listed are also laying off thousands of worker at the same time.

The criticism of these companies then is that they have just received massive financial windfalls via the GOP's tax cut programs and have portrayed normal corporate activities as signs of corporate largesse due to the tax-cut they've received. Should we tie the layoffs announced by these firms to their tax-cuts as well?

Walmart, for example, has struggled for years to attract employees due to the low wages they offer, wages so low that a good percentage of their labor pool is subsidized by taxpayers. When you combine that situation with the massive lay-offs and closures of Sam's Clubs the raising of wages seems to be less a generous overture driven by the tax-cut than perhaps a recognition that they must offer higher wages or continue to stagnate and fail.

I've also read that the bonus offered by AT&T is on the low-end of the bonuses offered every holiday to their employees. That's anecdotal though.

This is #fakenews. Walmart did not fire employees, Sam's club a separately owned subsidiary did, mainly because the Sam's club business is not doing well and had to make hard decisions. It is widely accepted that Walmart had no idea Sam's club was going to do the round of layoffs when they announced their wage increase and bonuses. Also, thinkprogress really should not be cited as a source of quality unbiased news.

Sam’s club is owned and operated by Walmart, at least according to wiki. That Walmart’s retail operation carries the same name as the corporation isn’t unusual. So this is fake news like the rest of what Trump calls fake news is (meaning, it’s actually true).

> It is widely accepted that Walmart had no idea Sam's club was going to do the round of layoffs when they announced their wage increase and bonuses.

Any source for that assertion?

> This is #fakenews.

Please don't do this here; it breaks the HN guideline against name-calling in arguments. Your comment would be fine without the first, and perhaps also the last, sentence.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

If anybody posted an article from Fox News here on HN, how quickly would that be flagged and commented on? Dang as a moderator you really should be be unbiased right?

Pretty sure there has been the occasional solid submission from Fox urls here over the years. I'm on my phone so can't easily check.

Crappy articles and solid articles don't map to entire sites very easily. Even highly politicized sites or low grade tabloids sometimes produce the kind of pieces we want here. We moderate HN for article quality, not website or publication quality.