by Financial Results and Consequences for Employees
Stellantis recorded a colossal net loss of $26.3 billion last year. This financial result had an uneven impact on different groups of the company’s employees. In particular, employees in the US, represented by the UAW union, did not receive any bonuses, as the payment system for them is strictly tied to the company’s adjusted operating income, which turned out to be insufficient.
Payments for Non-Union Employees
However, despite a difficult year, not everyone was left without reward. As it turned out, some Stellantis employees will still receive bonuses. We are talking about non-union salaried employees in the US, who may qualify for payments in the categories: corporate-wide, divisional, or individual. Corporate-wide annual bonuses will not be paid, but some divisional and individual bonuses are planned for payment at the end of March.
The exact amounts of these bonuses are not disclosed. The company only states that they depend on achieving “specific financial and non-financial annual goals, as well as the performance of the divisions to which employees are tied, and personal goals.” Stellantis emphasized that the payments “remain directly conditional on achieved results.” In other words, if certain goals were met, bonuses are paid. This contrasts with the profit-sharing system for unionized workers, which is based solely on adjusted operating income.
UAW Union Reaction
The news about bonus payments to a certain category of employees provoked sharp criticism from the United Auto Workers union. The UAW leadership expressed outrage that management is receiving premiums while rank-and-file union members were left with nothing.
“I, and the UAW as a whole, are disgusted to have just been informed of bonus checks being issued to management employees, while UAW members at Stellantis did not receive profit-sharing checks. Our members help ensure this company’s success every year, and they deserve to share in its success,” said UAW Vice President Rich Boyer.
Boyer placed the responsibility for Stellantis’s poor results in 2025 directly on former CEO Carlos Tavares. He stated that he planned to “undermine the UAW” and that “Tavares felt he gave away too much during national negotiations and was coming back to take it back.”
UAW President Shawn Fain also expressed contempt for this situation, noting:
“It wasn’t the workers who made the bad decisions that drove Stellantis profits into a ditch, [but] terrible management from the CEO on down. But as always, management gets the reward while the workers get cheated.”
This situation at Stellantis vividly illustrates the complex dynamics in a corporate environment, especially under financial strain. Different incentive systems for different categories of employees, even when the company is generally incurring losses, can lead to serious internal conflicts and undermine trust between the workforce and management. Such stories often become a reason for revising collective agreements and can affect labor relations in the future, especially in industries with strong union presence. At the same time, they raise questions about the fairness of distributing the company’s financial results among all those who participate in its creation.
