Company\'s Compensation and Benefit Package a Number

Company's Compensation And Benefit Package

A number of factors determine how a company compensates its employees. These factors may include economics, psychology and even sociology. To an economist compensation is viewed as a labor market determinant (Filer, Hammermesh, & Rees, 1996). As a human resource manager for Vanguard Industries I have been entrusted with the responsibility of explaining to the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) that guided my development of the company's compensation and benefit plan. I will specify economic factors I considered while coming up with the company's compensation and benefit packages, the manner in which they do so and the relative and absolute importance of each. Before coming up with a compensation and benefit scheme, it is imperative that matters pertaining employees' skill level, age, gender and minority and majority status are factored as they affect an individual's reward preferences and their view on what they contribute to an organization.

In my resolve to develop the company's compensation and benefit package I factored in the aspect of labor supply and the labor force participation rate. I took cognizance of the fact that a person can only be included in the labor force when he is 16 years of age or older as this was a government requirement. My action was also informed by the existing official laws on wage and salary, labor contract, payment time, wage payment delay and working insurance. To this end the minimum wage was set considering what the federal government had set as the minimum wage. With regard to working insurance I factored in the government provisions regarding employer sponsored disability insurance and life insurance. The major reason behind this kind of benefit was that any form of disability devastates workers and their dependants and the emotional and physical trauma that accompanies this can be overwhelming. Temporary and permanent disabilities prevent workers from working as they used to. Families of these disabled workers can rarely cater for the family needs. Upon the death of a worker his or her dependants quite often find themselves in difficult financial situation. Without the disability or life insurance funds many families find it extremely difficult to make monthly mortgage payments, car payments and supporting their children. I factored in the disability insurance to conform to the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) that was enacted in the early 1970s (Martocchio, 2010). my short-term disability insurance programs that encompassed recovery from injuries, recovery from surgery, treatment of an illness requiring hospitalization and pregnancy was supposed to take care of those workers who were not working. The pregnancy condition was factored in to conform to the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978 that mandated all employers to treat pregnancy and child birth the same way they treat other causes of disability. I intend to fund my disability insurance programs by involving independent insurance companies to provide disability benefits. The company will also pay premium to designated insurance companies to insure the employees against the cost of disability. The company will also support disability benefits through partial self-funding where the company pays claims from its assets invested in a trust fund for a limited period. The company will also purchase stop-loss insurance from an independent insurance company to cover for claims that exceed the self-funding limits. The company will also engage in full self-funding to provide for disability benefits from company assets. Before deciding on whether to partially or fully self-fund, I will factor in the size of the employee group and then estimate exposure or liability for disability claims. The former helps in predicting the probability of disability occurrence (Martocchio, 2010). The company's sponsored disability plans and benefits will be grossly influenced by the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967, the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 and the State Workers' Compensation and Social Security disability regulations. The ADEA Act bans the termination of employee's long-term disability benefit for active employees based on age. The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 insulates disabled employees against discriminatory employment practices (Martocchio, 2010).

While developing the company's compensation and benefit plan I also factored in the government-mandated social security and workers compensation programs. These initiatives were considered to bolster the government's resolve to ensure that workers are cautioned against deleterious effects of chronic unemployment due to severely depressed economic situations and devastating financial consequences.