Employers are increasingly asking workers and retirees to pay for some or all of the cost of many benefits — including life, disability, and accidental death insurance — they once took for granted as part of their compensation, according to industry studies.
“This is part of a bigger trend of companies cutting key parts of the total compensation package,” said Shaun O’Brien, assistant policy director for the AFL-CIO labor federation in Washington, D.C. “In many ways we are at a make-it-or- break-it period for the middle class, with all of this cost shifting.”
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A human resources company that I know of has notified its retirees that it has capped the amount that it will pay from 2013 forward on the costs of its providing retiree medicare supplement insurance. In other words, any increase in the supplemental insurance premiums - be it 10 cents or 100 dollars a month - will heretofore be the liability of the insured.
Let's say what this is in plain language. It is a cut in worker's salary any way you cut it and lessens people's ability to but things they need or want. Any employer who thinks this approach makes sense is shooting themselves in the foot. A impoverished population can not buy their goods. At the same time no worker should deal to impact their boss with any major change in their lifestyle. All this takes patience and more so on how deep an economic problem any recession has caused.