Bolivian punctuality bonuses

So here is an odd bit of social engineering for you.  The Associated Press reports that Bolivia is considering mandating bonuses for timely employees (Bolivia’s Morales proposes ‘punctuality bonus’, Feb 19):

The Bolivian government is pushing a bill that would encourage its chronically tardy citizens to show up to work on time.

President Evo Morales’ proposal would order public and private employers to pay a “punctuality bonus” to workers who go a whole month without arriving even a minute late.

Ignore the Big Brother aspect of this for a moment, and ask yourself whether this might work.  I suspect it won’t.  If it were as easy as having a little incentive pay, don’t you think everyone would be doing it already?  I would guess that for many firms they need to have X workers in order to get everything up and running.  Having X-1 is insufficient and little gets done until they have a quorum. Those employers may now face paying bonuses to a number of workers for being punctual but not necessarily productive because the bonus is not to guarantee that everyone is there.