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Employee Benefits

In: Business and Management

Submitted By sellington
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Discussion Question One Week Eight:
Discussion 1: “Employee Benefits.” Students will respond to the following:

Discuss how benefits contribute to an overall compensation plan.
The total wage cost of an employee to the organization is far more than the pay rate of that employee. Likewise, the total compensation reward of the employee exceeds his or her take-home pay. Total compensation consists partly of the pay of the employee and partly of a set of other rewards that are loosely called benefits. The addition of these items to the compensation package considerably complicates all aspects of the administration of compensation --from the compensation strategy to the implementation of the plan. Benefits are unlike base pay in that they are awarded for different objectives, they are not periodically given, they are oftentimes deferred rather than current, and they require different types of administration. Since pay and benefits together make up the wage costs of the organization, there is a trade-off between direct pay and benefits. This is an extremely important point and helps to explain some of the lack of wage increases in the US (Atchison, T. J., Belcher, D. W. & Thomsen, D. J., 2010). .
Benefits are a hodgepodge of programs that provide employees with a number of forms of rewards beyond their wages. Besides fringe benefits, this area has been called such things as indirect compensation, wage supplements, non-wage benefits, social wages, supplementary employee remuneration, supplementary compensation, and indirect payments. Here the simple term benefits will be used.
This hodgepodge of programs can be classified into ones that provide: * Protection. These programs help the employee guard against the hazards from illness, unemployment, old age and disability. * Time Off with Pay. This provides pay in a number of situations when the employee

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