It's still part of these people's compensation.
I got a bonus last month for meeting goals the previous calendar year. It wasn't a huge bonus, but it was compensation for the job I had done, and it was money owed to me.
If the company had decided to withhold those bonuses for six months because they decided it was politically unsafe to pay us what we were owed when we were owed it, they'd have likely lost some of their most valuable employees and gotten themselves sued.
Just because it's a "bonus" doesn't mean it's not earned, not that they can arbitrarily choose to delay paying that money to their employees.
Bonus checks are paychecks. Just because those people's compensation is dependent on performance, and their pay isn't doled out in 26 equal, biweekly installments, doesn't make it any less of a paycheck.
“Just because it’s a “bonus” doesn’t mean it’s not earned,”
Nobody said that.
It’s bad PR. Does that concept sink in at all? You are an engineer. Try to think like a marketing person. There’s a big downside to this.