This plan is by design very simple. The company will increase your wage or salary and will ask you to contribute part of that increase back to the company to help pay for the benefits you elect to receive. In every case, if you elect to receive the same benefits that you’ve received in the past, you will still see an increase in your wage or salary. Remember the intent of this plan is not to take benefits away but to pay for benefits that employees want to receive. If you elect to receive fewer benefits you will keep more of the increase as a higher wage.
Here is the bullet version of the plan, the rest of this booklet will go into more detail for each item and provide you with examples and calculators to see how this will affect you:
- Employees will receive an increase in wage or salary, 11% or 12.5%
- You will have a option to contribute to a company 401K pension and the company will match up to either 6% or 7.5%.
- You can choose which healthcare coverage you need and contribute 0-2% (no coverage = 0%, employee only = 1%, or employee plus 1 or more dependents = 2%).
- For hourly employees, you will receive an addition .15 per hour in your wage in place of a sick pay benefit.
The break down of what you will receive is based on 2 criteria:
- When you started with the company, on or before December 31, 2002 or after December 31, 2002.
- The reason for this criteria is that in the old plan employees that started on or before December 31, 2002 received 15% pension contribution while those who started after December 31, 2002 received 12%. This means that in the new plan the company will match 7.5% of the pension contribution for the 15% people and 6% for the 12% people.
- Salaried or Hourly compensation
- The reason for this criteria is that salaried employees don’t currently have a sick leave benefit and hourly people do. Since the sick leave benefit is being restructured into hourly compensation it does not apply to salaried employees.
These criteria are used to determine which Wage Calculator applies to you.