Beyond Basic Benefits: Employee Access to Other Types of Benefits, 1979-2008
Originally Posted: May 29, 2009 Since the late 1970s, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has collected data on employee access to various employer-provided benefits beyond the basics of health insurance, retirement savings, and vacation, sick and holiday leave. Periodically, BLS has modified the list of benefits by adding those that were increasing in popularity and dropping those that showed no growth, remained rare, or had limited user interest. For many decades, the BLS National Compensation Survey (NCS) and its predecessor surveys have collected and published data on employee benefits. The early surveys concentrated on the presence among workers of major employee “fringe” benefits within sampled establishments. (The percent of workers that have enrolled in a particular benefit or have it available for their use is known as the “incidence rate.”) Generally, the data obtained from surveyed firms were tied to commonly known benefits for which information was readily available and concepts easily understood. For example, one question might be, “Does your establishment offer health insurance to a majority of your office or plant workers?” Responses were limited to Yes, No, or Data not available. If the answer was yes, the funding of the benefit was determined--that is, whether the employer paid all of the costs or costs were shared by the employee. If a majority in a group was offered a benefit, all workers were considered covered; if fewer than a majority was offered a benefit, no worker was considered covered. In the early part of the 20th century, nonwage benefits were sparse, and the term “fringe benefit” was appropriate. In a 2001 article by BLS economists Robert Van Giezen and Albert E. Schwenk, the authors noted that the cost of benefits in the mid-1920s “was still a very small part of a worker’s compensation package, accounting for less than three percent of the employer’s cost for employee compensation.”1 In recent years, however, that figure has grown considerably. Data from the BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation (ECEC) program show that benefits accounted for about 30 percent of total compensation in December 2008.2 The advent of the BLS Employee Benefits Survey (EBS) greatly expanded the types of benefit details collected and published. The EBS was developed in the 1970s, during a period when the Federal Office of Personnel Management initiated its Total Compensation Comparability (TCC) program, which was designed to compare Federal and private pay and benefits. In 1979 and 1980, BLS conducted experimental surveys of benefits in medium and large firms.3 The EBS was designed to provide a timely and comprehensive measure covering all elements of employees’ nonwage compensation. If the EBS was to be comprehensive, newly appearing benefits had to be monitored and collected when they showed growth potential. In the 1981 EBS bulletin, a number of these benefits were published as “other benefits,” which covered benefits as disparate as paid funeral leave, subsidized meals, and employee parking.4 Table 1 shows these “other benefits” data for three occupational groups in private industry in 1981: professional and administrative, technical and clerical, and production employees.5
The data in table 1 show similarities and differences among the three occupational groups. For example, the percent of workers who were eligible for funeral leave ranged from 83 percent for production workers to 88 percent for technical and clerical. In contrast, 75 percent of professional and administrative employees were eligible for relocation allowances, but only 40 percent of technical and clerical employees and 26 percent of production employees were eligible for relocation allowances. The “paid leave” category grew over the years, starting only with paid funeral leave and military leave, but expanding to include paid sick leave, holidays, vacation leave, leave for jury duty, and personal leave, and paid and unpaid family leave. The items in the “profit sharing, savings, and stock plans” category moved from the “other benefits” category to form an entirely new category called “defined contribution plans,” which is now part of the retirement benefits category. Several benefits that were published in 1981 are no longer collected in the NCS, either because they lacked growth potential or because the costs, in terms of respondent burden and BLS resources, did not justify the collection effort. Table 2 shows the benefits that were studied at some point between 1979 and 2008 and subsequently dropped from the NCS.
Some of the dropped items had elements that were retained in the later NCS lists of benefits. The three child-care items, for example, were combined and are shown as one benefit on the new list. In addition, wellness programs now include some of the activities related to fitness centers. (See the accompanying article by the same author in this issue of CWC Online.) Two traditional benefits that were included in the EBS--paid lunch time and paid rest time--were dropped from the EBS after being collected from 1979 through 1993. During that period, in medium and large private establishments, the percent of full-time workers with a paid lunch time ranged from 13 percent in 1979 to 8 percent in 1991. A paid rest time was much more widespread than a paid lunch time, but the percent with the benefit dropped from its high of 76 percent in 1982 to 67 percent in 1991. The two benefits were eliminated from the survey because they showed little growth over time, there was limited public interest in them, and the collection costs could no longer be justified.6 Recently, there has been a renewed interest in rest time, in the form of napping. Some advocates of a napping break maintain that there is a productivity gain rather than a loss when napping is allowed, because the employee returns from his or her break feeling more energized. In an article by stress management consultant Elizabeth Scott, the author notes that because there are “pros and cons to each length of sleep” any amount can be helpful. “If you only have 5 minutes to spare,” she writes, “just close your eyes; even a brief rest has the benefit of reducing stress and helping you relax a little, which can give you more energy to complete the tasks of your day.”7 For 2009--that is, published data collected after March 2008--the NCS once again changed the list of benefits to better reflect current practices in the benefits environment, to conserve both BLS and respondent resources, and to drop items that were rarely encountered, showed no growth, and had limited user interest. Over the years, there were several different lists of “other benefits,” with the list for 2009 collecting data on 23 benefits, down from the 28 benefits collected for the 2008 survey year. Table 3 shows some of the benefits previously collected, some new benefits, and some benefits that existed but have been changed, such as combining a three-part child-care benefit into one question, the addition of retiree health plans for those under 65 years of age and those 65 years and older, and financial planning benefits.
Table 3 also shows the percent of workers with access to “other benefits” in 2008. (Employees are considered as having access to a benefit plan if it is available for their use.) The benefits with the highest rate of worker access were work-related education assistance (50 percent) and employee assistance programs (42 percent). Among the benefits with lower access rates, 2 percent of workers in private industry had access to employer-provided personal computers for home use, and 3 percent of workers had access to employer provided child-care funds. Some of the “other benefits” items published in 1981 are no longer in the NCS program, while others are now regularly studied. This is a direct result of the NCS keeping pace with changes in the labor market and responsive to data users’ requests. Since 1981, paid funeral and military leave became part of the regularly studied benefits. In 1981, approximately 88 percent of private industry employees were eligible for paid funeral leave; the estimate for 2008 was 69 percent. The estimate for paid military leave also declined, from about 80 percent in 1981 to 48 percent in 2008. Education assistance is another benefit that had published estimates in 1981 and 2008. About 78 percent of employees were eligible to get the benefit in the earlier period and approximately 65 percent had access in 2008.8
Notes1 Robert Van Giezen and Albert E. Schwenk, “Compensation from before World War I through the Great Depression,” Compensation and Working Conditions, fall 2001, p.19. 2 The Employer Costs for Empoyee Compensation (ECEC) data provide estimates of employer costs per hour worked for employee compensation, with the benefits broken down by cost and percent for the component parts. For example, in table 1 of the publication providing December 2008 ECEC data, employer costs per hour worked for employees’ insurance totaled $2.45 (or 8.4 percent of total costs), with health insurance accounting for most of the insurance bill, $2.31 (or 7.9 percent of total costs). See Employer Costs for Employee Compensation--December 2008, USDL 09-0247 (U.S. Department of Labor), March 12, 2009; available on the Internet at http://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/ecec_03122009.htm. 3 Medium and large establishments are those with 100 or more workers, except for the early years of the Employee Benefits Survey, when employment size varied by industry. For more information on establishment size, see the technical note in Employee Benefits in Medium and Large Firms, 1981, Bulletin 2140 (Bureau of Labor Statistics, August 1982), pp. 41–44; available on the Internet at http://www.bls.gov/ncs/ebs/sp/ebbl0038.pdf. 4 See Employee Benefits in Medium and Large Firms, 1981, Bulletin 2140. 5 The data in table 1 are from Employee Benefits in Medium and Large Firms, 1981, Bulletin 2140. 6 For more information, see Hilery Simpson, “Paid Lunch and Paid Rest Time Benefits: Highlights from the Employee Benefits Survey, 1979-93,” Compensation and Working Conditions, December 1996, pp. 18-23. 7 See Elizabeth Scott, “Sleep Benefits: Power Napping for Increased Productivity, Stress Relief & Health,” About.com: Stress Management, updated July 7, 2008; available on the Internet at http://stress.about.com/od/lowstresslifestyle/a/powernap.htm. 8 Additional 2008 estimates of “other benefits” are available on the BLS website at http://www.bls.gov/ncs/ebs/benefits/2008/benefits_other.htm.
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