I received the equivalent of a month's wages as a bonus when I met a certain set of criteria for my teaching. It was a nice pat on the back. This feels good.

Depending on your location and level of teaching, how did your union feel about that (if relevant)? Every time we try to reward our best teachers, it gets blocked because it's not "fair" to those who didn't excel. Go figure.

UK specific, in Further Education Colleges. A one off bonus payable when teachers met certain criteria: accessible to all teachers in the College, not any form of performance related pay or anything like that. Union were fine with that.

There was also a government initiative known as 'the threshold' but that was a permanent uplift in pay, again depending on transparent criteria, and again accessible to all teachers after their 'probationary year' (first year of teaching) was completed.

Unions are evil evil things.

China-based workers make about one third of their U.S. equivalents in those job categories -- so that'd be more like a 1K bonus stateside. Quite substantial.

[1] Source for e.g. receptionists: http://www.worldsalaries.org/hotelreceptionist.shtml

Definitely not bad -- I can also really appreciate an even split to all employees -- I know some might view it as unfair that someone who just started might get the same bonus as a long term employee, but for just a windfall, I think it was a good idea to keep it all even.

Agree. It surely would also cost a lot of time (and therefore, money) to determine a 'correct' uneven distribution.

In fact, it was given only to junior-level employees, not to the biggest executives and top developers.