Sending giant gifts Employee bonuses worth five years’ salary

A Taiwan-based shipping company has announced it will distribute bonuses equivalent to five years’ salary to thousands of workers.

Evergreen Marine Corporation, a shipping company that made headlines in 2021 when a giant container ship it operated got stuck in the Suez Canal, is gifting the bonus to 3,100 workers, reports The Straits Times.

The money, which spends a whopping $94 million, will be paid out to workers through mid-year bonuses worth 10 to 11 months’ salary for their performance in 2022.

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This is on top of the huge 50-month pay bonuses workers received last December, bringing their potential combined bonuses to more than five years’ wages for 2022.

The company says bonuses are distributed based on individual employee performance.

The company last week reported a record net profit of NT$334.2 billion (AUD16.29 billion) for its fiscal year ended December 31, 2022.

That was an increase of 39.8 percent over the previous year.

Evergreen first made headlines in March 2021 when its container ship Ever Given ran aground in the Suez Canal, seriously disrupting global shipping.

The giant ship was en route from China to the Netherlands with more than 20,000 shipping containers when it turned sideways near the southern end of the canal early on March 23.

Her bow was wedged in the channel’s sandy east wall, while her stern was pressed against its west wall.

The canal was closed, and much of the world’s shipping traffic was backed up behind it.