As I have stated so many times before, I am loath to hire employees because I was an employee once too. That pretty much means that I never met an employee whoever thought they were overpaid. For that matter, I never met an employer who thought that they pay their employees too little.
Despite what my former colleagues at union side law firms think, employers typically don’t have a treasure chest of jewels they are keeping away from their employees. It’s just the dynamic of a relationship where an employee wants to make as much as they can and an employer wants to pay as little as possible. It’s not evil, just human nature.
For those that never ran a business, they don’t understand how costs of payroll and benefits must be tied to revenue because an employer’s pocketbook is not limitless.
Thanks to medical costs and taxes, it’s expensive to have employees. Employers are taking away benefits and not putting benefits out there that are really enticing to current and prospective employees. As an employee, regardless of where I worked, the health plan got worse and worse because medical costs are spiraling out of control and the employer had to rein in costs. While Obamacare has helped with coverage, it’s done little to rein in costs.
While employers may feel free to cut back on the benefits they offer, the one benefit that they can’t afford to neglect is a retirement plan. An employer can certainly cut back on the contributions they make to their retirement plan(s), but they can’t just cut back on the services to their plan by sticking the plan with a cheap provider (if they are the ones paying for administration, rather than the plan) if it’s going to negatively affect the plan’s administration and compliance. The reason is because employers as plan sponsors are also plan fiduciaries too. So employers still may want to cut back on benefits, they need to make sure that they don’t do something that could negatively impact their role as plan fiduciaries.
Any change of plan provider or even in a change in benefits should be done in consultation with your plan providers and/or ERISA attorney to make sure that any cutbacks in benefits you must make won’t increase your plan fiduciary liability exposure.
