Delaware Employment Law Blog

Employee Benefits Attorney, Timothy J. Snyder, Esq., provides this update on pension-plan limitations.

The IRS has announced the pension plan limitations for 2009.  See the chart below for the limits for 2009 compared to those for 2008.

Employers are going green.  Employees are compressing their work weeks and saving gas.  And now, one major U.S. city is mandating employers provide "commuter benefits" to employees.  Will this prompt more employers to adopt a four-day workweek? 

Some key features of the new ordinance: 

Beginning 120 days after August 22, 2008 [December 22, 2008], San Francisco employers with 20 or more employees must provide commuter benefits to employees who work at least 10 hours of work per workweek within the geographic boundaries of San Francisco. This includes offering employees at least one of the following transportation benefits:

1. A pre-tax election of a maximum of $110 per month, consistent with current federal law; or
2. An employer-provided transportation pass (or provide reimbursement for) equal in value of $45 (or more) per month; or
3. Employer provided transportation at no cost to employees.

Is this a prediction of things to come?  If employers are required to pay employees up to $110 per month for the costs of commuting, I'd say that the four-day work week movement would likely explode.  One of the big motivators of the four-day work week has been the high cost of fuel. Employers claim that the compressed workweek will help alleviate the cost of gasoline for employees. 

[H/T to California's favorite HR blogger, HR Lori]

For more on the Four-Day Work Week, the pros and cons, various alternatives, and considerations for implementation, see:

1. Feds Take a Cue from the States and Consider the 4-Day Workweek
2. 35 Questions You Should Ask When Drafting a Compressed Work Week Policy
3. Positive Benefits of a Four-Day Work Week
4. 5 Steps Toward a More Flexible Workplace
5. Should a Four-Day Work Week Be Mandatory*
6. It's Saturday Today in Utah: 4 Day Work Week
7. Alternatives to the Four Day Work Week
8. Popularity of the 4-day Week Continues to Grow
9. Will Four-Day School Week Push the Four-Day Work Week Trend?
10. Utah's Mandatory 4-Day Work Week Will Save the World. Sort of.
11. Alternative Work Arrangement May Soon Become Mandatory
12. I Hate To Say "I Told You So"–The 4-Day Workweek Is a Hot Topic
13. How the Current Economy Could Affect the Future of Flextime
14. New Employer & Workplace Study on Flexible Schedules 
15. The Pros and Cons of a 4-Day Workweek: Cons 
16. New Survey on Workplace Lateness Supports Flextime Initiatives?

Work-life balance, toxic bosses, and generation gaps.  Three of our favorite topics at the Delaware Employment Law Blog.  They're also the focus of a Special Edition of Businessweek.  The magazine, on stands Monday, has a feature called Business@Work.  The workplace special report was created, really, by readers.  In surveys, blogs, and polls, readers talked about their top concerns at work and their strategies and practical tips for how they deal with it all.  The topics covered include, in addition to the ones above, how to stay creative and entrepreneurial in uncertain economic times, time management, and managing the bureaucracy of Corporate America.

There were lots of fascinating tidbits among the nine pages of text.  One of the main articles deals with the initiatives being taken by employers that focus on their employees' "happiness."   Go figure.  A "happiness initiative" is not necessarily a new idea.  After all, that's what employee benefits are, for the most part.  But some of the efforts being made by companies like Safeco, IBM, and BMW N. America, are new to me. 

How would your employees like the idea of being flown to Disneyland for the day--families included.  (If you like it enough to transfer, you'd want to apply at the L.A. office of law firm DLA Piper).  Or maybe you'd be interested in hiring a Chief Happiness Officer, who, if he's like the CHO at London ad agency, iris Worldwide, is in charge of managing regular pub crawls.  And for the academics in the group, there is happiness learning just around the corner.  Companies including Qantas and Sanofi-Aventis have called in experts to assess the emotional health of their employees. 

So are these "perks" really seen as perks by the employees who receive them?  Or does the fact that they occur during working time with coworkers and monitored by management make them any less enticing?

Employers who offer subsidized and on-site day care as part of their employee-benefits plan are very popular.  Employer-sponsored day care is a high-demand employee perk.  It is also a very difficult and costly benefit to implement. Google has recently learned this first-hand.

According to to a Joe Nocera of the New York Times, in an article titled, On Day Care, Google Makes a Rare Fumble, there has been a recent brouhaha about this very topic.  According to the article, Google has implemented a five-quarter plan to raise the cost of company-subsidized day care by approximately 75%.  [Gulp!]

Subsidized and on-site day care certainly aren't yet common but they've been around for more than a decade at many large organizations.  Google's own experience with day care has been a unique one.  Google began offering day care more than three years ago.  After devoting substantial efforts to it, the program offered only 200 (highly coveted) day care spots with a wait list of more than 700--resulting in a two-year wait for new parents and employees.  And the cost was no small thing.  Nocera writes that the cost to the company was $37,000 per child per year, as compared with the industry standard of $12,000 per year. 

The hyperinflation in cost will certainly reduce that waiting list. And if it doesn't, Google's recent practice of charging people several hundred dollars to stay on the waiting list should do the trick.  As a back-up, though, Google is opening new facilities, which should add another 300 spots. 

Employers interested in maintaining health-care costs, including hard costs like rising premiums as well as soft costs such as decreased productivity and absenteeism, have looked to wellness programs as a way to manage their employees' current health and prevent illness in the future.  Cancer screening is another way to achieve each of those objectives. 

Cancer is the second leading cause of death in the U.S.  This year, 1.5 million Americans will be diagnosed with cancer.  Nearly 600,000 will die from cancer and its effects.  With numbers this large, virtually every employer will eventually have to deal with the effect of cancer in the workplace.

One huge impact of cancer is the high cost of treatment.  According to a recent white paper by C-Change, encouraging and paying for cancer screening for employees is an effective way to reduce cancer-related costs, and to save lives in doing so.

The white paper reviews the cost-cost benefits of breast, colo-rectal, and cervical cancer on a business' bottom line.  A fact sheet also is available and makes for great support for providing employees with paid cancer screening.

As a Tennessee appellate court noted in rejecting Joan Frye's lawsuit against her hospital employer, “[T]he fact that a supervisor is mean, hard to get along with, overbearing, bellig­erent or otherwise hostile and abusive does not violate civil rights statutes.”
Workplace Bullying is a current hot topic in the business world. There are lots of theories about how bullying costs employer real dollars and cents in a variety of ways. From fdlr.com, here is another potential cost--employees' health.

Given the rapidly increasing cost of health insurance, this theory gives businesses another reason to put a stop to bullying behavior.

fdlr.com reports:

When it comes to employee health, bullying is bad for business.

Workplace bullying can create a cache of health problems for workers who feel overburdened by stress, said Gregg Brewer, employee assistance program supervisor for IntegNET, a division of Agnesian HealthCare.

Employee Assistance Programs are designed to prevent workplace bullying and solve conflicts that arise at work, among other things.

Brewer said someone who is being bullied at work is often under a tremendous amount of pressure.

"It leads to stress," he said. "And generally people who are under a lot of stress have 45 percent higher health- care costs."

Physical signs of stress include rapid breathing, fatigue, sleep and appetite changes, Brewer said. Emotional symptoms can include anger, irritability and forgetfulness and cause employees to have a hard time concentrating at work.

These stress symptoms can lead to changes in productivity and interaction with co-workers and lower morale, Brewer said.

More serious health problems have also been linked to stress.

"There is a strong connection between stress and cardiovascular issues," Brewer said.

Stress can cause blood pressure to increase and can lead to strokes and other heart problems, he said.

Brewer said it might also lead employees struggling to cope to drugs and alcohol.