The Ethics of Benefits

In all of the recent controversy over whether companies in general should be excused from having to pay for employee benefits that violate the company’s religious beliefs – or those of the people who control the common stock, anyway – one of the things that doesn’t seem clear is what a company’s obligations to its employees actually are. These days even arch conservatives seem to be okay with the idea that everyone deserves adequate medical care, assuming that no one asks them to pay for it. And I have already written in this space about how benefits are really part of a company’s compensation package, and how offering better ones is really no different from paying higher salaries than a competing firm. But the question of what constitutes a critical quality of life issue and what is just something that people would enjoy getting someone else to pay for isn’t always clear. I thought we should take a closer look…

First off, let’s consider the various health-related benefits. It may seem fantastical at this point in history that some companies don’t offer even the most basic healthcare coverage, but if all jobs came with health benefits there wouldn’t have been any need for the Affordable Care Act in the first place. Even here, however, it isn’t always clear what the critical factors are. For someone who as trouble getting around, the ability to select your own physician (so you get to choose a provider nearby your house) may be vitally important; for those with greater mobility it may not be. People with chronic conditions may need access to specialists, or want to see a doctor who is already familiar with the progress of their disease, while somebody whose primary health issue is limited to patching up their parasailing injuries may not care who is applying the bandages and painkillers…

As difficult as that is, it gets worse when we move into things like dental and vision benefits. If you need new glasses every year, then vision coverage is very important; if your eyes are 20/20 you may not care about this. Life insurance can be of relatively little use to someone who is single and childless; death and dismemberment coverage is critical for anyone who works with any kind of heavy machinery, but not so much for someone who never uses anything more dangerous than a copier. By the same token, someone who is relatively healthy may regard a time bank of sick days to be a nuisance, while somebody with a chronic health problem may need those days to avoid losing their job, and management may not want to offer them at all…

Things become even more extreme when we move into other kinds of employee benefit. For someone without children subsidized day care and personal days to deal with school/PTA meetings, soccer games, taking children to the doctor and what have you may seem like the company is punishing (and in some cases, fining) them for not having families, by making them do the family peoples’ work and lowering the pool of funds available for benefits they could use. But to a single parent trying to care for multiple small children on a relatively low income such benefits may be the difference between survival and succumbing to poverty – and rescinding them (or just not offering such benefits in the first place) seems cruel. The same could be said for tuition benefits for someone trying to escape from dead-end jobs, or even about the free turkey and pie giveaways we used to see at Thanksgiving and/or Christmas in some companies, in the case of a disadvantaged family that will otherwise be feasting on macaroni and cheese with puffed cereal on the side…

The more we consider this issue, the more it seems as though one person’s critically-needed benefit is another person’s wasteful boondoggle or inappropriate entitlement. Which leads me to ask the question: What do we, as employers, have an obligation to supply to our employees? Do we owe them more than the agreed-upon wages that we feel are fair compensation for the work that we are requiring them to do? If we have an ethical responsibility to provide the necessities of life, who gets to decide what things are really necessary and which are merely desirable? Happy and healthy employees are more productive, and ultimately lead to a more profitable company – provided that the costs involved in making them that way don’t exceed the increase in the firm’s income. But at what point does something stop being a basic necessity of life and become an inappropriate use of company funds?

It’s worth thinking about…