Permanent Employment and Employee Benefits - Assignment Example

When talking about permanent employment, public employers have a responsibility to provide the employees with a secure and predictable retirement plan. This is because the employer will most likely work with the employee for all his or her working years until he or she retires. In this perspective, the employer has the chance to plan with the employee for his or her retirement based on the position that the employee holds in the organization (Walsh, 2006). Even where the employee may leave the place of work for another place or be fired because of misconduct, the employer still has a responsibility to provide a secure plan so that the employee knows this beforehand. The plan can be canceled when the employee leaves ahead of time.

Public employers do not have a responsibility to provide employees with a secure and predictable retirement plan where the employee works for a short-term contract or where the organization offers employment only on short-term contract plans. In this perspective, it will be difficult to provide such a plan because the employee will not stay with the company until they retire.

As much as the public employer might have the responsibility to provide employees with a secure and predictable retirement plan, employees must also plan for themselves because the organization might close down any time within the employment period because of money problems or other issues. This would definitely put pressure on the employee in case he or she did not have a proper retirement plan.

Reference

Walsh, D. J. (2006). Employment law for human resource practice. St. Paul, Minn.:

Thomson/West.

Comment on first thread: the writer comments on the issue in an excellent manner because he links current practice to past practice. He also links the issue with the current problems making it difficult for retirement plans to work.

Comment on thread two:  while the second thread is short, the writer offers reasons as to why he feels that public employers should provide their employees with a secure and predictable retirement plan. The writer has organized his thoughts properly making his comment easy to understand.

Part II Master List of Employee Benefits

LIST

PRIORITY where A=Absolutely necessary; B=Highly desirable; C=Desirable; D=If possible

PERCENTAGE %

Health Insurance

A

20

Long Term Disability

B

15

Annual Leave (Vacation)

A

20

Insurance

B

10

Holidays

C

3

Employee Assistance program

C

4

Daycare

D

5

Relocation benefits

B

15

Probationary benefits

C

3

Education saving plans

D

5

TOTAL 100%

The challenges that I had when assigning percentage values had to do with deciding what is the most prominent benefit to the employee and which should be given the highest percentage. I also had a challenge in terms of deciding how much percentage I should give to the most important benefit in order to balance the others. There are also benefits that fit into the same priority but have different percentages. This was also a challenge in allocation.