vania-janet/multiturn-rag-retrieval-data huggingface dataset:
Conversly, then you should not enjoy the benefits privided by being in a union then right?  That seems simple enough, but that's not how it works.   Unions by law have the duty of fair representaion, so even if you are not a member, you still are awarded all the benefits and protections of the contract.   So, it's not that simple, because how do you balance that if not for fair share?  The union still has to pay to protect you, but you don't have to pay for any of the work they do.  So then, if you can get all the benefits of being in the union and not pay a dime for it, why would you?  Seems logical right, it's a good deal, we all want to save money.   Well as everyone stops paying and the union can't afford to operate as it did, like any organization, it restructures and lays off staff.  Now the union no longer has the resources to offer you good representation, which causes the dues paying members to be frustrated and to drop out and or ditch the union entirely.  Now no one in your workplace has a voice, a contract, or any protections.   That may turn out to be great,  but you know, the company wants to save money too..   The company is also no longer obligated to offer you the same wages or benefits that your coworkers negotiated.  So now the company is free to cut wages, benefits and workforce to improve thier bottom line or executive bonuses.
i am not against bonuses, provided employees have health care, retirement contributions from the corporation, a living wage and a claw back clause if exec is fired for cause.  The problem is for too many companies the bonus is based on exec's squeezing employees benefits or bought buy the execs using profits to buy back stock to increase stock prices and inflate bonuses based on stock price.
"I agree.  Job offered benefits were implemented to entice people to work for their company when the demand for good workers was higher than the supply.   Now people expect benefits and the govt has also took it upon itself to mandate employers provide medical benefits.  One way around this is to higher part time workers to keep costs down.  So basically the governments ""good intentions"" of helping the masses will actually cause more harm directly to the people it was supposed to help."
I think it is clear that this has a lot to do with keeping salaries down.    The company has a maximal possible salary limit (i.e. the most they would be willing and able to pay) for what you do.  You have a minimal possible salary.  Both of you know that the current salary is in between the two figures.  For negotiations it would be very useful for you to know the maximal possible salary (i.e. the utmost the company would be willing to pay you to stay and continue); the company on the other hand is obliged to keep costs low and hence would like to know your new minimum acceptable salary so they won't make an offer too high.    But if you knew all salaries of people around you -- you could make a better guess about your own maximal possible salary.  You probably would over-estimate it because we all tend to over-estimate our own relevance and competence, but it would be a better informed guess at least.  The company would hence give up an informational advantage which could lead them to have higher costs.  So they will ask you how much you were offered at the competitor (i.e. they will be close to your new minimum acceptable salary) while trying to prevent you from learning anything about the maximal possible salary..
"Others have pointed out that many benefits offered by employers ""for free"" are actually taxed; the employee must pay taxes on the value of what they're receiving (usually services of some kind). This is called imputed income. Also pointed out was that healthcare is an exception; a specifically protected class of benefits that aren't taxed. But sometimes they are. Many companies now offer domestic partner health coverage as well, regardless of whether the couple is in any kind of civil union or other arrangement. The costs to the employee vary, but it's often that they simply pay double of what their individual coverage contribution would be. Independent of the employee's direct contribution for their domestic partner, they must also pay taxes on the value of the employer's cost of the coverage. This can be significant, as typically the employer is paying the lion's share of the healthcare cost."
Exactly.  Bosses/managers often frame things in terms of 'you should be thankful for us giving you a paycheck each week' when by definition, you are being paid less than your labour, strictly speaking, is worth.  ie, on the whole what you do is paying the company MORE than you receive.    Personally, I'm fine with this trade off, within reason.  I get to go home at 5, and if the phone rings I ignore it if I like.  If the place folds, no one is coming after me for a share of the company's debts, either.  But don't let anyone blow smoke that by paying you they are being generous.
For instance, even if the overall aggregate deductible was $10,000, a single person in that family plan could not incur more than $6,850 in out-of-pocket expenses. (In 2017, the out-of-pocket maximum will increase to $7,150.) After they hit that number, insurance covers everything for that person, even as the rest of the family is still subject to the deductible. From your question: Thanks - not sure I totally follow you. My question is, essentially: ""Say a typical large employer X gives you 'healthcare' as a benefit on top of your salary. In fact, how much does that cost corporation X each year?"" ie, meaning, in the US, about how much does that typically cost a corporation X each year? That's a good question because they may qualify for tax advantages by offering to a number of employees and there may be other benefits if they encourage certain tests (like blood work and they waive the monthly fee). More than likely, using the above equation may be the maximum that they'll pay each year per employee and it might be less depending on the tax qualifications. You can read this answer of the question and it appears they are paying within the range of these premiums listed above this."
"Is this not just romanticism for the ""good old days""? Why do people assume small, local businesses are treating employees so much better? Do you think the corner superette is showering their employees with 20/hr wages and elaborate benefits packages?"
I don't believe there exists a tax-advantage for paying employees a bonus instead of increased salary. It's all expense to the employer, it's all income to you, and it's taxed the same (bonus checks might have more withheld, but your end of year tax burden doesn't change). It does benefit your employer to delay a significant portion of your pay until the end of the year, delaying payment provides buffer in case of delays in getting paid by the client. Your employer could even put the extra money to work earning more money over the year.  It would depend on your contract, but are you due your bonus if you were to leave your job before year-end? If not, that's a great reason to delay payment, because it makes you less likely to leave mid-year, and should you not work out they can keep the difference.
"I think Feral Oink said it well here when someone asked if they should negotiate for additional benefits in lieu of a portion of salary. ""You never want to take a lower salary, especially not in exchange for something that is conditional e.g. benefits. Your salary is the only thing that is guaranteed as a condition of employment. Other things can be changed by the employer at a future point in time."" Does it make sense to take a lower salary so I can still contribute to a Roth IRA?"
"When private companies are dishonest, or ""run roughshod over workers"", if effects no one but those workers.  It also puts that company at a competitive disadvantage as employees don't want to work there.  This creates an opening in a competitive market for an honest company to grow.  Plus, there will always be honest and respectful companies to work for as long as a market is competitive (little regulation).  I work for a very large company today that values its employees greatly.  When unions are dishonest, especially public employee unions, it takes its toll on everyone.  Their salaries and benefits come from our local property and state income taxes.  Their dishonesty is a growing financial burden to my family and friends.  In no way does a higher percentage of union workers benefit ""everyone"".  It benefits those specific union workers who are unfairly given money that has been forcefully taken from a tax payer."
From the other point of view (company use) it makes sense to segregate expenses incurred on the company's behalf away from an employee's personal expenses.  This way if there were any requirement to prove that certain expenses were for the company's benefit it is not intermingled with an employee's personal expenses.   From an ethical point of view:  To avoid these types of confusing and conflicting issues, most employer's prefer to have a segregated expense process especially if an employee is regularly incurring expenses on the company's behalf.  As YMCbuzz mentions you should check with your employer about their expense policy.
I wholeheartedly agree with this, of course there are limits, but in my experience it's not the pay that makes you truly happy. Though it certainly relieves certain day to day stress, it's mostly the people you work with that tend to make or break you liking your job. In order for me to leave my current job I'd probably have to get at least a 50% percent pay increase for me to even consider it. I will not trade my current happiness for money alone.
Not-very-serious companies always try to reduce your pretended salary. This also happens in Argentina. My advice is to look for another opportunity because you have to take into account that if you join the company this will happen again; for example, in the future, they may lowball you on raises.
Everyone pays their personal income tax with funds from their employer;  some of it through withholding, and the rest through the balance due at the time of filing. All that is happening here is that the company is calculating  your personal tax return for you, and fiddling retroactively with the gross salary to yield a specific after-tax salary. One problem is that there is a lot of information I put in my return to earn deductions, that I would not care to tell my employer.   The system would also appear to be contrary to public policy.  Governments create tax deductions to give a larger income to those with socially acceptable expenses:  health care, dependents,  etc.  The system you describe would give employees with such deductions a lower gross salary.
"The company itself doesn't benefit. In most cases, it's an expense as the match that many offer is going to cost the company some percent of salary.  As Mike said, it's part of the benefit package. Vacation, medical, dental, cafeteria plans (i.e. both flexible spending and dependent care accounts, not food), stock options, employee stock purchase plans, defined contribution or defined benefit pension, and the 401(k) or 403(b) for teachers. Each and all of these are what one should look at when looking at ""total compensation"". You allude to the lack of choices in the 401(k) compared to other accounts. Noted. And that lack of choice should be part of your decision process as to how you choose to invest for retirement. If the fess/selection is bad enough, you need to be vocal about it and request a change. Bad choices + no match, and maybe the account should be avoided, else just deposit to the match.  Note - Keith thanks for catching and fixing one typo, I just caught another."
"sorry mate, its not about being loyal. it's about what you negotiate.   you stay with a company long enough and you'll only rack up your annual 2% pay increase and see minor raises until you're promoted to incompetence. If you really want to see healthy compensation than you need to realize it's about negotiating to your true value to the market - not just join a company and cross your fingers for the best.   Frankly, if someone is willing to pay more ($$ and other benefits) then you'd do yourself and those you support a disservice not going for it. There are times when you should be less aggressive about it for the long haul, but don't forget, a company's job is to turn a profit which means getting workers to work at the lowest possible salary. And when a corporation thinks someone is ""loyal"" and won't move, then a smart company will go ahead and test that assumption.  Re: entry level expectations about their true value - absolutely agree, expect entry compensation. But don't think being ""loyal"" is what changes that. Only increasing your actual value does - not just because you've been around forever."
In Sri Lanka, this is the normal practice. We, employees are free from the burden of paying tax for the income we get as a salary. Because that part is been taken care of by the company/employer.
Even though the person you're responding to actually said paternity leave, I'll respond to the benefit that maternity leave provides to employers:  Businesses with a paid maternity leave policy benefit in 2 ways. 1) Companies that pay for a maternity leave period (as opposed to allowing the time off but requiring it be unpaid) have hire retention - which means that the woman is more likely to come back than become a stay at home mom. 2) Companies with good maternity leave policies get the pick of the litter in hiring women. So while they're perhaps having to hire men they feel are in the top 20th percentile, with women, they're able to hire top ten percentile.
You have a lot of incentive to NOT leave your current employer. A competing employer may offer to ""buy you out"" of your anticipated bonus by giving you a $1.25M signing bonus (since you'd almost certainly not be eligible for a performance bonus during your first year there). You might negotiate with them and say ""I'm on track for $2M this year"", and then they would figure out if you're really worth that much to them. So you can see this all has to do with the prospective employer trying to compensate you for any income you're already counting on receiving from your current employer. By jumping ship now you would be foregoing that guaranteed/expected income, so the competitor wants to remove that anchor that might be holding you back from making the move. Stocks/options that you already own are irrelevant to the prospective employer. Since you wouldn't be giving those up by changing jobs, there's no reason for them to factor into the equation."
So thinking on this a little more, I guess it's not completely cut and dried. For example, if the sales position was commission only, a bonus might be a way to ensure the sales team earn a base minimum income. This would allow them to have some level of comfort that they would be able to meet financial obligations like mortgages, kids school etc.
That's not really the point. I, employer, am not necessarily responsible for my employees' life conditions. Perhaps I only intend the job to be a supplement, as in for students. I don't understand why people imagine the labor market, and the effects of price controls, to be different than in any other kind of market.
So Idaho is bringing back slavery?  Non-compete agreements, in a democratic and free world are criminal. Preventing someone from plying their trade and getting paid more for it, is what free-enterprise is all about.  Maybe companies need to focus more on providing improved salary and benefits and staff welfare, rather than indenturing them?  If companies want to enforce an extended non-compete period, then they should pay for it - pay the employees salary for the entire period of non-compete.   THAT should be the law!
Perhaps business actually like this expenditure then? I guess it would be beneficial for them in that they, in a way, coerce employees from not leaving. Trying to find another job with equal insurance can be rather rough.
The idea is that the premiums (or costs) associated with the plan are a business expense, you know that already.  The distinction here is that employees don't pay premiums, they elect to contribute. The company sponsors a plan, the employees then choose to accept less salary in order to participate in the employer's plan.  The idea is that you're foregoing income. Why is the employee not taxed on this cost?  One major reason is that the employee has no say in, and often no idea, what the gross costs are (some find out if they ever receive COBRA election paperwork). There are more benefits than strict healthcare that are Section 125 eligible.  The government has a vested interest in keeping the population healthy, and when the ERISA laws and Section 125 were written it was (and still is) a pretty low friction way to get health insurance out to more people.  At this point, taking away the tax break from the employees would be a huge government take away from most of the population.  Try to get a politician to take something away from taxpayers. Why doesn't the deduction exist in kind to people buying individual coverage?  Ask your legislators.  There are thousands of preferential tax treatment oddities, where some industry will get some sort of benefit or break.  I'm not sure what leads you to think there needs to be some supremely logical reason for this oddity to exit.
Not if the bonuses are also on a grid. At my work it's the same way -- you get paid a certain amount for every year of tenure you have at the company (outside experience generally doesn't count) and then the bonus varies depending on how your performance rating goes. Everybody knows what the bonus levels are.
The companies specialize in offsite construction and offer everything from design to building the entire structure off site. One of the main benefits of offsite construction is that there will be no obstruction to your current workflow. All the construction work will be done offsite in the factory and you will not have to bear anything except the agreed cost
"Is any article painting a company's policies in a positive light by difinition a ""spin piece""? Costco has been paying their employees more than their competitors for ages as it leads to better productivity and less turnover. Try looking at the world in a less cynical light, you'll be happier for it."
Not sure how your companies bonus structure is setup but bonuses are typically based on performance. Commission drives sales people to sell more but once you get to a certain threshold you may find that a sales person is earning enough to quench their hunger for more so their drive may diminish somewhat. Bonuses help bridge that gap e.g. you get $NN bonus at the end of the year if you sell $YY by the end of the year. This helps ensure the company to reach it's financial goals so the people who make the products can still get paid.   EDIT: I don't agree that a company should make bonuses par for the course. If the company is not doing well, no-one should get bonuses.
This is an old question that has an accepted answer, but it has gotten bumped due to an edit and the answers given are incorrect. I am assuming this means that every other Friday, the company is going into the open public market, buying those shares and then giving it out to the employees. No. Companies will internally hold shares that it intends to offer employees as additional compensation. There are no open market transactions, so the market price of the stock does not change (at least not due to buying pressure).  The only net effect is an equivalent expense for the compensation, but that should already be accounted for in the share price as normal operating expenses. These share may come through an initial buyback from the market, but more common is that when companies issue new shares they keep some internally for exactly this situation.  If they issued new shares every pay period, it would dilute the existing shares several times a quarter which would be difficult to account for.
That's my point, a 20k bonus at big 4 for non partners is really common. You can easily get 40-50k if you're highly rated. Also, I'm not saying the max for partners is 600k, that's the average. This is much higher than the average Accenture partner-equivalent.  The data is out there, just look at glassdoor. It's perfectly ok to not be big4, you can still make a good living at Accenture. But, realistically, the compensation and other benefits are lower. My theory is because public firms pay less than private firms, what's yours?
This is bad statistics. If you look at people who jumped ship, of course you're going to see bigger increases in salary because you're not counting those that looked for a new job and didn't find a better offer. They stayed put.  People are complacent but companies are, too. Employers aren't putting a lot of effort into firing bad employees as soon as they can. So there are employees that aren't jumping ship and could be paid more but there are also employees that should be kicked off the ship and paid less, but aren't.  All that said, staying put is easier than moving and there's a price for it. If you're willing to move around, you might do better. Might not. If you only look around at the ones that did move, of course it's going to look like they did better!
I don't count bonuses because they fluctuate from 5% to 200% which depends, up to 50%, on how the company does as a whole, not just how well you perform. Can't count on something like that. The guys I see working 70+ hours are the ones that end up with the big bonuses and great jobs without having to go to a top program after work.   Anyway, best of luck to you in your career. It seems like you know what you need to do.
I'm not asking for the world to owe a huge salary and benefits.  I am asking for jobs to pay a wage and provide benefits that allows the people they use to make money to live without worrying about getting sick or making rent.  I'm not saying everyone needs a salary that can play for a lexus and flat screen tv for being a cashier at walmart.  Just enough to pay rent, food, bills, healthcare.  Why in the world would you work at a place that doesn't pay you a living wage if you aren't getting something else out of it?
Some companies offer discounts for shareholders. I believe Disney used to do so, for example; if your family was doing the Disneyland-every-year routine that could be a significant benefit.
Yeah, I mean, what it really comes down to is the fact that life isn't fair.  I would think that if your company is squeezed enough that it's paying a lot more for new employees who do what you do already, then if you go to your boss and ask for a raise, he's not going to say no. It's way easier (and cheaper) to keep an employee, particularly a good one, than to find someone new. Just a thought.
Salaries and etc are a business expense and chargeable against revenue for tax purposes.  It is NOT tax deductible but it is an expense on an income statement in calculating net profit (after tax).  You could say salary &amp; etc are tax effective but not tax deductible.