Research On Compensation Trends Into The 21st Century

RESEARCH ON COMPENSATION TRENDS INTO THE 21ST CENTURY
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Summary
Health Insurance
The article details some of the compensation trends that have taken place in the 21st century. Though the article seems to suggest that its contents reflect the compensation trends of the 21st century, it only reflects during the second world war. Its analysis is only in America and the analysis starts after the war labor board capped the increase in cash wages during the war time to avoid inflationary pressures from competition in the labor force. The authors observed that employers turned to use employee benefits to influence the labor pool in its favor. After the war, the tax incentives to employers made them offer more benefits to their employers. Eventually, employee wages and salaries started increasing albeit at a slower rate than the benefits which became more appealing and diverse.
The authors focused their analysis of the trend to that of private health insurance and retirement plans. They referred to other sources such as Stelluto and Klein who had published an analysis and made predictions about private health insurance and retirement benefits in 1990. Their prediction about health insurance is that it would continue increasing. Their prediction was right as the cost increased at a faster rate compared to the total benefits until 2011 when it grew at a relatively slower rate since 90s.
CITATION Ric191 \l 1033 (Works & Meharenna, 2019)also found that the employer costs per employee hour worked for private industry also increased since 1991 to 2018. However, the cost of healthcare increased at a faster rate than the consumer price index. The authors also found another trend that was birthed by the introduction of HAS. HAS are Health savings Accounts where employees can pay for future medical expenses with tax exempt contributions. CITATION Ric191 \l 1033 (Works & Meharenna, 2019)found that the percentage of workers with these accounts is 28% of the workforce as of 2018. However, the more a person earned the more he/she was likely to have an HSA account and vice versa. Additionally, people wore more likely to have an HSA account if their establishment had more than 100 workers as opposed to fewer employees and full-time workers were also more likely to have them than part time workers.
Retirement plans
In this section, CITATION Ric191 \l 1033 (Works & Meharenna, 2019)focused on defined contribution and defined benefits plans and how they have evolved over the years. Defined contribution are retirement plans that are portable and can be transferred from one establishment to another. Benefit plans are the pension plans that provided guaranteed income during lifetime and they were calculated on the basis of years of service and percentage of the worker’s salary. Stelluto and Klein’s prediction was that more pension plans would become more portable in the coming years. Employers seemed to favor defined contribution as it was less costly. In their analysis, CITATION Ric191 \l 1033 (Works & Meharenna, 2019)found out that as at 2018, defined contribution had higher level of participation as opposed to occupation groups. There was different level of participation among occupations but management professional and related occupations h...