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Bonus strategy: three assumptions and one consequence

The 'bonus strategy' is defined by employers as a way to seek to make the workers work more and better using grants for additional monetary benefits to wages as an incentive, conditional on an increase in productivity. Two examples of the strategy are mentioned, one of them referring to the Department of Education of the State of São Paulo and the other to the University of São Paulo (USP). It examines the following three assumptions of the strategy the conception of painful labor, workers imbued with the spirit of capitalism, and monetary reward as the only form of incentive in an attempt to show that none of them have universal validity and are therefore strictly false. Then we present the additional evidence for the invalidity of the assumptions, derived from the work of retired teachers and teachers who have the credentials to retire, but that are still working. In the last section, the most disastrous consequence of the use of the bonus strategy is exposed: the 'idiotization' of society.

work regime; evaluation; pay for performance; citizenship


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