Away from pay raises and towards job perks, one-time bonuses

New York

YACHT-SIZED bonuses for Wall Street big shots and employee-of-the-month plaques for supermarket standouts are nothing new, but companies' continued efforts to keep costs down have pushed employers to increasingly turn to one-off bonuses and non-monetary rewards at the expense of annual pay raises.

"There is a quiet revolution in compensation," said Ken Abosch, a partner at Aon Hewitt, a global human resources company. "There are not many things in the world of compensation that are all that radical, but this is a drastic shift." According to Aon Hewitt's annual survey on salaried employees' compensation, the share of payroll budgets devoted to straight salary increases sank to a low of 1.8 per cent in the depths of the recession. It dropped to 4.3 per cent in 2001, from a high of 10 per cent in 1981. It has rebounded modest…