Benefits - Employment Benefits - Are They Headed Up Or Down?

This graph presents what employers pay for people — salaries, wages, and benefits. The costs charted are weekly averages for all employers of the civilian workforce. Constant dollars are used to eliminate the effect of inflation.

Salaries and wages dipped slightly in the early 1990s; benefits remained stable. The cost of benefits rose as a percent of total compensation in the middle of the period while wages declined briefly. The trend has, however, been towards a stable relationship between these costs. Benefits began at 27% of total compensation in 1986 and were again 27% in 1999.

The employee benefit package consists of many items — vacation time, sick leave, health insurance, retirement income accounts, disability insurance, life insurance, to name a few. Before we conclude that all items in the benefit package have remained at consistent levels during the period covered here, we should look more closely at the individual items within these plans. We turn to that matter in the next panel.

Sources: U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Katherine G. Abraham, Commissioner, Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, 1986-99, March 2000, p 3. Data were converted to constant 2000 dollars using the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Consumer Price Index for urban dwellers (CPI-U), All Items series.