This year’s pool translates into a 16.6 percent cash payout for eligible employees — or about two months’ pay — which will be paid out on Valentine’s Day. The payout represents the sixth year in a row that the airline has paid more than $1 billion in profit-sharing.

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“For years, I would get beaten up by Wall Street,” chief executive Ed Bastian said during a U.S. Chamber of Commerce event in Atlanta last week. “They thought the profits were theirs, and ‘why are you giving the profits away to the employees?’ Wall Street has actually come full circle, and they realize that Delta is the most awarded airline in the world because of its employees.”

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Unlike individual incentive plans, profit-sharing plans are typically based on corporate profits rather than individual performance and payable to all employees in major work groups.

Brian Kropp, a group vice president at Gartner, the global research firm, said only 12 percent of the companies its firms work with have profit-sharing plans. “Delta offering it, and paying out this much is truly different (and higher) than any other large company that we know of,” Kropp said in an email. A 2018 survey by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago found that the median profit-sharing amount reported by employees surveyed was $2,000, or 5 percent of pay.

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United Airlines said Tuesday it spent $491 million in profit-sharing last year, up from $334 million in 2018.

Southwest Airlines paid out $544 million, or 10.8 percent of eligible employees’ compensation last year. American Airlines paid out $175 million in profit-sharing last year, or 1.5 percent of eligible earnings, spokeswoman Andrea Koos said in an email. American will update its figures Thursday.

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Cash profit-sharing plans tend to be more common in transportation industries such as airlines and automakers, said Ken Abosch, a compensation practice leader at Aon Hewitt. That firm’s own surveys show that about 14 percent of employers still offer cash profit-sharing plans, while the figure 20 years ago was likely closer to 40 percent, Abosch said.

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What defines them, he said, is a more all-inclusive approach to rewards that give payouts to all employees, or all hourly employees, as is the case with automakers such as Ford and General Motors. Increasingly, he said, companies have shifted to more incentive-driven cash awards that are based on company, department and individual performance but may not be available to all employees.

“Companies have worked very aggressively to try to increase the relevance of these plans by creating an individual performance component that creates more variability from person to person in what’s paid out,” Abosch said.

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He pointed to the firm’s survey data that shows average cash bonus programs tend to range between 4.7 percent and 12.9 percent, depending on union, hourly or salaried professional work groups.

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