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Comment by castwide | Hacker News Reader

Nothing you include in "total compensation" is guaranteed by employment.

Why would that make any difference? What an employer spends on an employee is what the employee gets. If the employer spends less, the employee gets less, and hence is a pay decrease, even if not in nominal terms but in real terms.

Premiums for a silver plan can easily be $30k per year for a family of 4. If an employer decides to cover 70% of it instead of 80%, that is literally a pay decrease of $3k, not to mention possible changes in coverage, deductible, and oop max.

For example, the employer could keep the 80% subsidy, but increase deductible from $1k to $10k. Unless premiums go down a lot that is basically a huge pay decrease too.

Employment ain't guaranteed either, so I'm not sure that guarantee is worth much.

And you can be pretty sure that many workers would walk if the extra goodies they are accustomed to but which ain't guaranteed were to be withdrawn. Assuming the competition still provides them.

There are good reasons for companies to provide those benefits. And they most definitely are part of their total compensation. When a study does not take this into account, their results are not valid.

I think we are in agreement.

Employer contributions to SS taxes are guaranteed by employment. Also other payroll taxes added on by states.

Not so. I'm part of a religious community for whom FICA is something we can opt out of via IRS Form 4029, and I can avoid contributions to FICA more broadly (not just SS taxes!) by handing HR the approved 4029 that I receive in response to filing.

I don't know how available this is to folks who aren't Mennonite or Mennonite-adjacent, but it's there.

About 0.14% of the population is Mennonite. By filing 4029, you assert that your community is going to provide the equivalent of SS and Medicare, so it amounts to about the same thing.

My remark was a rebuttal to the assertion that these contributions were guaranteed. That notwithstanding, I'm unsure that I agree that it amounts to about the same thing; we tend to take care of each other as a matter of due course and not as a transaction.

The mainstream Anglo-American attitude around this kind of support leaves me scratching my head a lot of the time.

It is a kind of transaction. While I don't know the details, isn't it some form of you support the community, and the community supports you when you're in need?

Not at all. Tithing[0] is contributed as one is able, but assistance in the face of hardship is no questions asked. For my congregation in particular while I was growing up, this extended even to non-members, and there was a strong thread of volunteerism.

0: Tithing can take many forms beyond giving cash. I tithed my RSUs.

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