What's in a bonus?

I have just read about the employees of Northern Rock getting bonuses for their part in the bank's progress towards repayment of the 25 billion quid we stumped up to bail it out. The bonuses are averagely two grand or 10% of salary: loose change to the bastards who caused all this mess.

I'm not going to debate the rights and wrongs of Northern Rock employees' worthiness of a bonus. Instead, I am interested in the words of the union representative who is defending the bonus payout, on the grounds that "staff have had to endure a difficult working environment, including a freeze on their normal bonuses and promotions for some 18 months".

What stopped me short were the words "normal bonuses". It seems to me that the original meaning of bonus as "an unexpected but welcome event" has been lost and instead bonuses have become part of annual salary entitlement. One of the Sunday financial pages breathlessly reported, as evidence of the increasingly tough conditions applied to mortgage-lending, that several lenders will no longer include annual bonuses when calculating maximum borrowing levels. The surprise should be that they ever included them. When bonuses were first conceived they were earned on exceptional performance of either or both the individual or the company. How then can a bank or building society possibly know how a prospective borrower is likely to perform in his or her job! Do they have access to borrowers' perfomance appraisals? Do they study company reports and broker's predictions for the employer companies of prospective borrowers. Of course not. It is yet another example of the profligacy and irresponsibility the banks have been showing for years.

We all know the bonus culture has been out of control. But it's not just in the amounts some of the evil bastards were getting (and in many cases still are), but in the way that if you are eligible for a bonus it is assumed that you will get it. It has become just a lump sum portion of normal compensation packages. This can't be right? Whether the bonus is for £200 or £20 million, shouldn't it only be paid for exceptional delivery above and beyond the the requirements of the job?