Panasonic Employees Ordered to Buy $1500 Worth of the Company’s Products
February 14th, 2009Japan is in very deep shit. But then again, which country isn’t?
Via: Telegraph:
Its electronic gadgetry is gathering dust on the shelves of high street stores, nobody is buying new fridges and the mountain of unsold plasma televisions is growing by the day.
However, in desperation, Panasonic has hit on the perfect counter-attack against the consumer slump: it has ordered every member of staff to go out and buy £1,000 of Panasonic products.
Large swathes of corporate Japan are expected to follow suit, either by directly commanding or indirectly “pressuring” employees to divert part of their salaries towards the goods that their employers produce.
Toyota has already tacitly applauded a “voluntary” scheme in which 2,200 of its top brass decided to buy new Toyota cars, and the president of Fujitsu recently e-mailed 100,000 staff and gently pointed out how nice it would be if “employee ownership rates” of Fujitsu PCs and mobile phones were a little higher.
The 10,000 Japanese staff affected by Panasonic’s unorthodox strategy do not have long to consider their purchases.
Management insists that staff buy their Panasonic goods — whether they need them or not — by the end of July.
Upper-level managers, all of whom have been “encouraged” for years to fill their homes with Panasonic goods as a symbol of corporate loyalty, are being asked to spend at least 200,000 yen (£1,500).
A Panasonic spokesman said that because the “Buy Panasonic” request was made to management-level employees, the company did not expect refusal rates to be high.
The emergency directive, some Panasonic employees say, is a particularly cruel blow: the same 10,000 managers now being commanded to fork out for unwanted electronics were told two weeks ago that their salaries and bonuses would also be slashed.
The company itself is staring down the barrel of one of its worst annual earnings performances ever, with a Y350 billion flood of red ink expected by the end of the year.
Panasonic said that the move, which is not unprecedented in company history, was aimed at forcing management to “recognise the severity of the current business environment” — a recognition that might have been expected to be in place already, Mitsubishi Tokyo UFJ brokers said.
Only a fortnight ago the company announced plans to close 20 per cent of its factories and cut 15,000 jobs from its global workforce.
Other warning signs from that announcement included pay cuts of between 10 per cent and 20 per cent for directors and 5 per cent for managers.
Even if other Japanese companies are less overtly aggressive about forcing staff to buy their products, many are expecting the Japanese corporate tradition of socially enforced loyalty to kick in and force the issue anyway.
Companies such as Sony and Sharp hold regular discount sales of goods for employees, and sources at both companies have suggested that the most recent events have involved a “clear sense of pressure” to be seen supporting the company by buying its products.
The “Buy Fujitsu” campaign involved an e-mail from the president that read: “If everyone in the company gets together, then it will become a great power.”
I guess that’s the Japanese version of double-plus-good, then.
Undoubtedly these employees will be allowed to buy products through some internal “sale-price savings scheme”.
On a similar but very different note…
Several years ago I was working for Wells Fargo’s private portfolio group, and they announced that all employees, company-wide, would be required to move all outside investment accounts “in house” to Wells Fargo. Since for disclosure rules these outside accounts had been declared years ago, it wasn’t too difficult to enforce. But the upshot was, the 150,000+ employees of Wells were under orders to “repatriate” their entire liquid life-savings under the Wells’ roof.
Obviously, now, we see that was exactly the wrong position to embrace.
They (quite rightly) claimed it aided “compliance”. But as should be clear by now (and as everyone, in my world at least, knew), regulation and audit is almost entirely devoid in the investment part of the banking world. No, the bottom line was: milking employee assets to boost a single quarter’s numbers.
I fled the corporate world not long after that, precisely because I saw the need for more diversification – in every aspect of the word.
What Panasonic is doing is at least harmless. A stereo will still be a stereo five years from now. They’ll boost their quarter, and the employees will get a decent product(s), whether they need it or not. And if not, it’ll still be barter-worthy.
Unlike my former collegue’s retirement accounts.