Consider, for a moment, the purpose of offering benefits to
your employees. All pious mouthing aside, benefits are part of the compensation
package which the company uses to attract the best available workers – or, at
least, employees of sufficient quality to suit its requirements. If a given
company offers better compensation than others in the same industry, whether
that means higher pay, better health insurance, dental and vision insurance,
retirement plans or other benefits, then jobs offered by that company will be
more desirable, creating greater competition for those positions and giving the
company access to a greater selection of possible employees. It is important to
note that while access to adequate health care may be considered a basic civil
right, having somebody else pay for it generally isn’t, which is why there are
so many jobs that do not offer acceptable medical insurance – and why the
Affordable Care Act was required in the first place…
Given that this is the primary function of all compensation
elements from the company’s standpoint, intentionally degrading any part of the
compensation package is counterproductive to the point of idiocy. Any measure
which makes the package less attractive – which eliminating coverage for desired
services most assuredly does – lowers the company’s ability to attract or
retain the best personnel. This lowers productivity, lowers profitability, and
generally decreases the overall value of the firm. In this specific case, negative
feelings generated by the policy (and the lawsuit to protect it) also represent
an excellent chance of angering or alienating employees who already work for
the company and do not have the option of quitting – including member of the
workforce connected to the issue by politics or ideology as well as by biology.
This will lower productivity still further, and that doesn’t even consider the
impact the company’s position is having on public relations and customer retention…
Now, as already noted, there are companies that do not offer
health benefits of any kind, and from a purely strategic standpoint we can
understand why. If employee relations are not a priority – if the labor situation
in their industry is effectively a buyer’s market – then a company may not need
any advantage to obtain the best employees, and if workers in that industry are
considered easily interchangeable there may not be any great pressure to retain
them, either. Alternately, a given company or industry may have an operating
margin so thin that offering any additional compensation would make their
business model untenable; the choice might be between higher wages and other
benefits, for example. This is the first case of which I’m aware in which a
company has decided to intentionally hamstring itself because of the religious
convictions of the ownership, though – even assuming that’s actually what is
happening…
Personally, I find the religious argument difficult to
accept – especially since nothing the company does can prevent its employees
from using the disputed birth control methods if they can find another way to pay
the resulting medical bills. If the owners of a business actually support any
religious belief, it seems obvious that it would be preferable to run the
business effectively and use the resulting higher profits to support whatever
ministry or other activities those beliefs require, rather than destroy the
business and galvanize the opposition into the kind of action that could
actually set back the owners’ religious goals. Or, to put it another way, in
addition to the various legal, ethical, political, civil, social, customer
relations, community relations, public image, employee relations and financial arguments
against this policy, the whole concept is also stupid to the point where I can’t
even think of a bad metaphor for how stupid it is. And the worst of the legal
implications may be yet to come…
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