Jasper County Democrat, Volume 19, Number 73, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 December 1916 — Christmas In Wall Street [ARTICLE]

Christmas In Wall Street

IN banks, corporation headquarters, trust companies, bond houses, brokerage shops, anywhere in Wall street, you cannot for the life of you get employees to admit that they expect Christmas bonuses as a regular feature of their annual salaries. Nor can you get employers to admit that the Christmas bonus is so established a thing that to omit obedience to its tradition would be heresy. They tell you vaguely that “it all depends." Questions about “what is going to be done for the boys” are resented out of all proportion to their impertinence, although there is much public interest in the matter. This is .what one bank did to free itself of what somebody in power thought an outright seasonal nuisance. About twenty years ago a large national bank quit its invariable habit of giving to every man, woman, boy and girl about the place, from president down to last scrubwoman, a Christmas present of $230 in cash. The men at the head of the bank decided their belief that the system was pernicious. Imagine a messenger boy with $250 to blowl It bred horrors after the holidays, and it was a sentimental business. So that season the management increased everybody’s pay by $250 a year, thus including the extinct bonus In all salaries. The result was excellent Now they make no fuss whatever about Christmas at that bank. It may happen that If raises are to be granted around the end of the year they may fall on or near Christmas day and be celebrated by sentimental recipients as tokens of the good will of the season. But there is nothing official about Christmas at the bank.