America’s labour shortages have done little to boost perks for workers

THE PANDEMICBLSRAND has fundamentally transformed the American workplace. More people than ever are working from home. Meetings have moved from offices to screens. Employees are quitting their jobs in droves, pushing job vacancies to record highs. Amid widespread labour shortages, firms are handing out pay rises and bonuses to attract workers. But what about other perks, which make up a big chunk of employees’ overall compensation? If you listen to bosses, firms have expanded benefit plans in the wake of the pandemic, providing workers with more flexible hours, emergency sick leave and mental-health services. But official statistics show only modest gains in fringe benefits since the start of the pandemic. Although the value of non-wage compensation for low-paid workers grew faster than that for better-paid employees last year, the disparity in the level of provision remains vast.Health insurance, paid leave, pensions and other “fringe” benefits doled out by private-sector firms accounted for 29% of total compensation, on average, in 2021, up from 20% in 1970, according to the Bureau of Labour Statistics (). If perks such as free food were to be included, the figure would be higher still. Although they are harder to measure, amenities such as flexible working hours are valuable, too. A paper published in 2018 by researchers at Harvard Medical School, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Corporation analysed survey data and concluded that the freedom to set one’s own schedule is worth a pay increase of 9%, and the ability to work from home is worth a raise of 4.1%.