Re: SMART First Year in Review What are they Not Telling the Public
Author: Dr Zarkoff
Date: 11-06-2018 - 12:03
> Appendage dredges up fully-loaded cost vs. stated salary. It's an old story. Adding standard allowances for health benefits, pension or 401K match, social security employer share, unemployment taxes, workers comp and probably a few other odds n ends can push a "salary" up by 50-100%,
Does SMART participate in RRB or SSI? If RRB, the "SSI employer share" becomes RRB taxes, and the last time I looked, there was no such thing as an "RRB unemployment tax". If SMART is self-insured, then I wouldn't expect it to pay into the workermen's comp system.
Generally speaking, if hourly wages are $x per hour, the employer sends an equivalent payment equal to about 75-90% to the medical plan. These medical plan contributions are part of the fringe benefit package agreed to in the Union contract, so they aren't deducted from the paycheck and don't appear on the pay stubs. Since about 1990, however, the trend has been to pay for increases in medical contributions by subtracting them direclty out of the monthly paychecks, where the transactions appear on the stubs. Since they add-ons to an already existing system, these "employee contributions" don't represent the entire revenue stream going into the medical plan.
Medical plans for slaralied employees, like exempt employees and management, are another matter entirely (and usually not as good as the ones covered by union agreements).