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Faced with the rapidly rising costs of employee benefits, companies are scaling back. It's become distressingly clear that employees are increasingly on their own when it comes to retirement savings and health care.
Employers don't typically trash (丢弃) an important employee benefit-too much negative press-but they are shifting more of these costs onto workers. who feel it in the form of higher health-care premiums, rising co-payments on drugs and much less certainty about their retirement finances.
Towers Perrin. a global human-resources-consulting firm, recently surveyed hundreds of U.S. companies representing more than 13 million employees on changer they are making-or contemplating making-to their employee-benefits packages. The knife cuts deepest on the most expensive benefits, with the biggest often being healty care.
It costs the average American company more than $14,000 per year to provide coverage to an employee and her family. The employer's response: shift more of that growing burden to workers. As a result, companies have seen their health-care spending rise 29% over the past five years.but employees have seen their outlays-for premiums, co-pays and deductibles-rise 40%.
Retiree health care is getting hit hardest-just when the boomer generation needs it most. Of the employerssurveyed, 45% have already reduced or eliminated subsidized health-care coverage for future retirees, and an additional 24% are planning to do so or considering it. Of those offering the perk(额外补贴), roughly 25% put a dollar limit on how much they will spend per retiree. "Once the limit is reached, future inflation risk transfers to the retiree," notes Ron Fontanetta. an executive with Towers Perrin.
Corporate pensions, the third leg of the proverbial retirement stool (the other two being Social Security and personal savings), are also being eroded as the foundering (下挫的) stock market wreaks havoc on employer pension funds. At the end of 2008. employer-sponsored pension plans were underfunded by more than $400billion, according to Mercer, a management-consulting firn. The recent stock-market rally has halved that deficit. but it remains a funding sore spot and is one more reason that companies are turning away from this benefit.
"Companies initiated many of these benefits in a different time," says Fontanetta. "Retiree benefits started being offered when many companies had a young workforce with few retirees. so it was not really a cost they had to contend with.” Today it's the reverse, particularly in old-line industries.Detroit’s Big Three automakers, for example, have more than Four rimes as many retirees as active hourly workers.
