EDIT: Answer achieved – wouldn't count either way since it's considered a “gift.” I took out the paragraph with the actual question and am leaving this up as a vent because it's so incredibly shitty of them. This came on the heels of a company-wide meeting where we were all blamed for our own and everyone else's burnout in an industry with the highest occupational suicide rate. The good thing is that our monthly surveys come out next week and we are planning on making it very clear that this is unacceptable.
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I work an hourly non-union corporate job. Rather than getting an annual bonus, we have a system of quarterly profit sharing where, if we made a profit over the same quarter last year, a percentage of that profit is split among all of the hourly workers. In theory, because we do an annual price increase, we should get the profit share every quarter. However, our 2021 price increase was done 3 months later than it should have been so our Q4 profit ended up barely coming out to anything for the profit share. Our company was acquired into the corporation and it was explicitly stated at the time that this profit sharing would be replacing our annual bonuses.
Initially, we were told they were going to just be folding that amount into one of our regular paychecks. Normally, they make a whole big event out of handing out checks but since the amounts were so small, they weren't planning on printing checks. We were then told that the Q4 profit share was going to be rolled into the Q1 profit share and we would get both together so they could still hand out a check for it.
We received a communication earlier this week announcing that we had made the Q1 profit share and will be receiving our checks in a few weeks. It was also mentioned in that communication that we had made Q4 but that “the payouts would have been minimal…and based on that dollar amount checks were not issued.” I emailed the person who sent this email, requesting clarification, and she responded that “Benefits has further confirmed that the amounts will not be rolled into this next check as the amounts were minimal.” She also clarified that the amounts were under $20 but did not specify exactly how much.
The way I see it, it shouldn't be up to the company if we get that money or not – no matter how little it is, it's still our money.