January 22, 2001 (The Editor’s Desk is updated each business day.)
Life insurance benefits keep pace with wages
Overall, the face value of life insurance plans offered by employers have kept up with wages in recent years, thus preserving the protection of income over time.
[Chart data—TXT]
For example, over half of full-time State and local government workers participating in life insurance plans have "flat-amount" coverage, wherein the same amount is payable to all employees regardless of their salary. The average amount rose from $11,200 in 1987 to $18,900 in
1998—a gain of 69 percent. State and local government workers' wages increased by 48 percent in this period.
For employees in medium and large private establishments, the most common method of calculating life insurance benefits has been to base the face amount on earnings. The available data indicate that their life insurance benefits also kept pace with wages in the 1980s and 1990s.
These data on benefits are the products of the Employee
Benefits Survey. The face value or amount of a life insurance policy
is the amount of money payable to the beneficiaries designated by the
employee. Read more in "Have Life Insurance Benefits Kept Pace with
Wages?" (PDF 85K), by Jordan Pfuntner, Compensation and Working Conditions,
Fall 2000.
Of interest
Spotlight on Statistics: National Hispanic Heritage Month
In this Spotlight, we take a look at the Hispanic labor force—including labor force participation, employment and unemployment, educational attainment, geographic location, country of birth, earnings, consumer expenditures, time use, workplace injuries, and employment projections.
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Read more »