Insurance agents and brokers play an important role in facilitating the contracting of fully insured health insurance and pharmacy benefit plans for U.S. employers. They are primarily compensated ...with a commission charged back to the plan. Using a national sample that covered 11.7 million employees enrolled in 33,689 health plans in 2017, we found that a plan’s commission (median: $178) was positively associated with a plan’s premium (coefficient: 0.01 for the full sample and 0.03 for small plans, p < .001) after controlling for the number of enrollees. The commission-to-premium ratio was greater for smaller plans and plans offered by nonmajor insurance companies, and varied by geographic region. Policy makers should consider improving transparency of the commission to facilitate employers making efficient broker contracting and plan purchasing decisions. The fee-based brokerage model has the potential to help employers and workers contain health care spending.
Background
Deployment of SARS-CoV-2 vaccines has sparked the debate on action that employers can lawfully take to promote vaccination uptake among employees. Absenteeism reduction, liability ...concerns, occupational health and safety, protecting the health and safety of clients and service recipients might prompt such action. This raises questions about employees' freedom of choice and right to (refuse) consent. The research examined the related policy and regulatory framework in Hungary.
Methods
Legal and policy analysis was conducted on Hungary's immunization policy as well as its legal and regulatory framework for SARS-CoV-2 vaccines deployment. The focus was on health law and labour law to explore whether and how SARS-CoV-2 vaccination could be turned into a workplace safety requirement.
Results
In Hungary, SARS-CoV-2 vaccination is currently voluntary. However, the Hungarian Healthcare Act and Labour Code allow for making it mandatory by ministerial decree prescribing a vaccination obligation as an employment condition for certain jobs. The National Public Health Center determines on a yearly basis the list of jobs concerned. Individuals may only be exempted if their (current or foreseeable) underlying health conditions so require. Further to the Labour Code, if employers use negative incentives (e.g., sanctions) and positive incentives (e.g., bonuses) to enforce vaccination, they must satisfy the conditions of necessity, proportionality and non-discrimination.
Conclusions
Although SARS-CoV-2 vaccination is currently voluntary in Hungary, the legal framework for mandatory vaccination at work is put in place. When it comes to enforcing the vaccination obligation, sanctions imposed by employers and related application of the necessity and proportionality standards have not yet been tested in Hungarian courts.
Key messages
Regulation shall ensure protection of employees’ rights as part of SARS-CoV-2 vaccination policies.
Measures promoting vaccination must respect the legal requirements of proportionality, necessity and non-discrimination.
While worksite wellness programs are generally designed to help employees realize better overall health, some employees may not see them in that light. The current study sought to better understand ...why employees refuse to participate in a new employer-sponsored wellness program. This study also investigated how participation in the program is related to employees’ self-perceived health, efficacy to be healthier and their perceptions toward their organization providing useful resources to engage in a healthy lifestyle. A survey of more than 1,500 employees at a large Midwest organization was conducted after their annual open-enrollment period. Open-ended responses from participants refusing to participate in the wellness program (n = 297) indicated privacy considerations as their primary concern. They also thought participation would take too much time, conceptually thought the program was unfair or not useful and felt they were already healthy and not in need of the program. Both participants and nonparticipants had no differences in self-perceived overall health. However, participants had greater self-efficacy, and perceptions that their employer offered useful resources to engage in a healthy lifestyle, than nonparticipants. Recommendations for communicating new wellness programs to employees are discussed.
Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to identify key dimensions of employer brand (EB) and empirically examine the impact of different dimensions of EB upon job satisfaction. A six-factor EB model ...has been tested for reliability and validity through confirmatory factor analysis. The study also addresses the moderating role of gender in the relationship between EB dimensions and job satisfaction.
Design/methodology/approach
– Structural equation modelling has been adopted to determine the contribution of EB dimensions towards job satisfaction of employees. Key dimensions of EB are identified through literature review. Item generation has been done through literature review and exploratory structured interviews with employees.
Findings
– The results demonstrate that EB acts as a critical predictor of job satisfaction. All the six dimensions of EB (training and development, reputation, organisation culture and ethics and corporate social responsibility, work-life balance and diversity) were found to be critical predictors of job satisfaction. Also, gender is found to have moderating effect on the relationship between EB dimensions and job satisfaction.
Originality/value
– This study avers that EB can prove to be an important antecedent of job satisfaction. The construct EB in this study reflects an understanding of EB from a newer lens from the perspective of existing employees of a developing country and also demonstrates the moderating role of gender.
Generally, businesses are capable of implementing corporate social responsibility (CSR) and environmentally sustainable behaviors as they pursue their profit‐making activities. While there are a ...number of contributions that investigated the effect of CSR and responsible environmental practices on the companies' bottom lines, few studies were focused on the strategic attributions of responsible corporate behaviors in the tourism industry context, during an unprecedented pandemic situation. Hence this research investigates the stakeholders' perceptions on the hospitality businesses' social responsibility and environmentally friendly practices. The data were collected from a sample of 462 research participants who worked in tourism and hospitality. The findings suggest that their employers' stakeholders were triggering their businesses to engage in ethical behaviors, responsible human resources management and to invest in environmentally friendly initiatives. As a result, they were creating value to their companies, to society and to the natural environment. In sum, this contribution implies that there are strategic attributions of CSR behaviors and of environmentally sustainable practices as responsible businesses can improve their growth prospects and increase their competitiveness in the long run.
The key aspect of the inclusion of people with disabilities (PwD) in the workplace is how they are perceived by employers who make decisions on hiring employees. The article presents the results of ...CAWI (Computer Assisted Web Interview) research conducted among Polish and Finnish employers (n = 414) in 2021 using a proprietary questionnaire. Employers were asked to assess the state policy in the field of PwD’s inclusion, the social atmosphere in this respect, the level of acceptance of privileges/special solutions dedicated to PwD in the workplace and the knowledge of the specificity of disability. When analysing the obtained data, we verified the differentiation of Polish and Finnish employers’ assessments, the impact of respondents’ characteristics on their assessment and the relations between the assessments of various aspects of PwD’s inclusion. For the analysis, we used the t-test of independent samples for equality of means and the Pearson correlation coefficient. The results showed that Finnish respondents assess the conditions for the full inclusion of PwD much better than Polish ones. The characteristics most differentiating employers’ assessments is gender and the fact of employing PwD. There were also correlations between the responses of respondents in both countries to three out of four analysed questions from the questionnaire. The differences found in this study indicate that it would be worth extending the research to other European countries to generalize conclusions about the influence of cultural determinants on the situation of PwD on the labour market.
The distribution of COVID‐19–related risks Baylis, Patrick; Beauregard, Pierre‐Loup; Connolly, Marie ...
The Canadian journal of economics,
February/Février 2022, Letnik:
55, Številka:
Suppl 1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
We document two COVID‐19–related risks, viral risk and employment risk, and their distributions across the Canadian population. The measurement of viral risk is based on the VSE COVID‐19 Risk/Reward ...Assessment Tool, created to assist policy‐makers in determining the impacts of pandemic‐related economic shutdowns and re‐openings. Women are more concentrated in high‐viral‐transmission‐risk occupations, which is the source of their greater employment loss over the first part of the pandemic. They were also less likely to maintain contact with their former employers, reducing employment recovery rates. Low‐educated workers face the same viral risk rates as high‐educated workers but much higher employment losses. This is largely due to their lower likelihood of switching to working from home. For both women and the low‐educated, existing inequities in their occupational distributions and living situations have resulted in them bearing a disproportionate amount of the risk emerging from the pandemic. Assortative matching in couples has tended to exacerbate risk inequities.
Résumé
Dans cet article, nous documentons deux risques associés à la COVID‐19, soit le risque de contracter le virus étant donné l'emploi occupé et le risque de perdre son emploi dans le contexte de la pandémie. La répartition de ces risques dans la population canadienne est aussi documentée. La mesure du risque viral est basée sur l'outil de visualisation des risques par profession et industrie liés à la COVID‐19 de la VSE, créée pour aider les décideurs à déterminer les impacts des fermetures et réouvertures des différents secteurs de l’économie durant la pandémie. On note que les femmes sont plus présentes dans les professions à haut risque viral, ce qui explique en partie leur plus grande perte d'emploi durant la première partie de la pandémie. Durant la pandémie, elles étaient également moins susceptibles de demeurer en contact avec leurs anciens employeurs, ce qui a affecté négativement leur taux de retour au travail. Le risque viral était similaire pour les travailleurs peu éduqués et les travailleurs hautement qualifiés, mais les pertes d'emplois ont été beaucoup plus importantes pour les travailleurs peu éduqués. Cette différence peut être attribuable à leur plus faible capacité à effectuer leur travail à domicile étant donné la nature de leur emploi. Tant pour les femmes que pour les personnes peu éduquées, les inégalités existantes dans leurs conditions de vie et leur répartition professionnelle les ont conduites à subir une part plus élevée du risque lié à la pandémie. Enfin, l'appariement assortatif des couples selon les professions a eu tendance à exacerber les inégalités face aux risques.
This theoretical scientific study explores using a working time recording system as a digital management tool in public administration. It explains why such a system is necessary in public ...administration and lays out the report’s goals. The main goal is to identify the possibilities of using modern technology, such as the system of recording the working time of public administration employees, to improve its efficiency and pro-client orientation. Recording the working time management ensures that most government and public administration duties are organised and arranged promptly for easier retrieval and allocation of tasks to different departments. A thorough assessment of the literature also looks at the current studies on working time tracking systems, particularly in the context of public administration and their possible effects on effectiveness, accountability, and transparency. Employee privacy-related legal and moral issues are also covered. The Materials and Methods section describes the system’s implementation in detail, covering system selection, employee training, data collection methods, and technological considerations. As a result, the use of time recording systems in public administration has been found to have various benefits, including better work–life balance, fairness and transparency. These solutions improve accountability and trust by streamlining workforce management and ensuring compliance with labour laws. The main result of our research is the design of a theoretical model applicable in public administration for monitoring an employee’s working time.
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