7th
Compensation: A Matter of Perspective
When you think of what you get paid, do you consider your benefits? How do you differentiate between pay and benefits to begin with? Have you ever gotten a job offer like this?
“We’ll pay you $90,000 per year
- $55k in money paid directly to you
- $20k for health insurance
- $10k for retirement
- $5k for several other benefits”
If you have, I’d love to hear about it. I certainly never have. I’ve never seen a job listing like that either. I see things like:
- Competitive salary
- Health Insurance
- 401/k with company matching up to 3%
- 2 weeks of vacation your first year
- 8 paid holidays per year
Okay, maybe if you’re being offered a job as CEO of a major corporation you might get offered $X million in stock options or whatever, but you’re playing a different game than the vast majority of us so I’m not counting you.
I would argue that about the only one who looks at it from the first perspective is an employer and only when the bills come in for that matter. It’s been a bit of a hot button issue where I work as health insurance costs have sky-rocketed and employees have been asked to shoulder more of the burden. I completely understand that, from my employer’s perspective, they have to pay more money to have me work there, plain and simple.
Maybe compensation should start being pitched from the first perspective. “I’m going to pay you $90k/year and here are some benefits that are available to you and they cost X amount right now and typically go up about X% per year.” Then it would be like any other cost of living going up. I didn’t all of a sudden get paid more when the price of gas went through the roof, so why should I get paid more when health insurance goes up? As I write that, I start to think to myself who stands to benefit from these costs being essentially hidden from much of the public? I suspect the outrage from the public towards corporate America would be even greater if they directly felt the pain of the rising costs of benefits. Instead, people with employer provided health insurance and retirement take it for granted for the most part. It’s just something we get, like Labor Day off. That way, the insurance companies have made it into a fight between employer and employee, not them vs the employer and employee on the same team.
One of the most striking examples of this is the fight between teachers and the “rest of us” in Wisconsin. Yes, it’s more than just teachers, but it’s basically about the teachers. This post is a result of an article on Forbes essentially about how teacher’s pensions were part of their pay and not some sort of handout, so by asking them to put part of their pay into is really asking them to take a cut in pay. I now wonder if that’s where things went wrong in the first place. When the airlines were going bankrupt - okay, so when aren’t the airlines going bankrupt - the unions make concessions in the form of pay freezes, pay cuts, benefit cuts, all to keep their jobs. In our case though, we didn’t ask our workers to take a cut in pay for the good of many. We went out there and painted a picture of greedy teachers living in their ivory towers, unwilling pay their fair share. Then we told them we were cutting their pay and we told ourselves that we were actually cutting back on lavish bonuses basically. These aren’t Wall Street bankers getting $10 million bonuses when their customers were losing their life savings. A good teacher is worth their weight in gold. We all know there are serious problems with our education system, but there’s a lot right with it too. Where would we be without it? It’s certainly not going to get any better by working against each other.
