A government study suggests U.S. employers and life insurers have done a good job of helping workers life insurance death benefits keep up with growth in wages. Benefits for most employees of private establishments have increased about as fast their wages, and benefits for blue-collar local and state government workers have increased faster, according to an analysis by Jordan Pfuntner, a compensation research at the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. The results provide numbers to test economists assumptions about the labor market, Pfuntner says.
People tend to guess about benefits.
Benefits for state and local workers grew even faster. Because the bureau conducts the surveys every few years on different schedules, finding comparable benefits and wage data is difficult, Pfuntner says. The bureau is responding to the demand for better data by setting up a new, annual survey, the National Compensation Survey, that should make benefits studies far easier, by producing a steady stream of data combined in a single database, Pfuntner says. The bureau has already begun to publish the results of National Compensation Survey income data. It hopes to begin adding benefits results within the next few months.