Hoi,
In my country health care insurance is compulsory. If anything this means
that everyone can see a doctor and believe it or not, investment in health
care is beneficial to the wealth of a nation.
I am appalled that people consider health care something that is best left
to the individual. It means that everybody has to pay the same amount
irrespective if they can afford it.
Please study the subject and YES, the WMF is in the USA however having a
health care policy for its employees is a best practice if you care for
your employees.
Thanks,
GerardM
On 5 January 2013 11:11, Thomas Morton <morton.thomas(a)googlemail.com> wrote:
On Saturday, January 5, 2013, James Salsman wrote:
Michael Snow wrote:
... You think that having people mortgage their future and simply
giving them more cash, which they don't ultimately enjoy other
than to pay loans at distressed interest rates, is a greater benefit
to them than providing the best insurance coverage we can offer?
No, I didn't mean to imply anything like that. If a typical working
age American's immediate family suffers catastrophic medical expenses,
it's most likely going to be one of their parents, who aren't covered
by the Foundation's or any other employer's plan. Medicare only pays
for 60 days of hospitalization, with copayments totaling about $30,000
for the following 60 days, and then it stops paying altogether. (See
e.g.
http://www.kff.org/medicare/upload/7768.pdf ) In any case, most
Americans who enter bankruptcy because of medical expenses have on
average about $45,000 of debt, which amounts to 2.2 years of the
difference between the mean salary of Wikimedia and Mozilla Foundation
junior software engineers. It's not like the difference between being
able to save a loved one from bankruptcy and keeping them in the
hospital when they need it would displace existing health insurance or
even make a serious dent in retirement savings.
This is a bad idea because it puts the responsibility of saving/investing
that money on the employee.
Also without healthcare insurance simple everyday costs can be astronomical
(prescriptions etc.).
So all that would happen is those employees would have to organise their
own healthcare, and would probably not get as good a deal as the foundation
can arrange.
And that brings up another important point: What kind of talent does
the WMF forgo by not being able to offer employees competitive
retirement savings? I suggest that there are very good reasons that
all the additional Glassdoor reviews in the past week didn't really
move the needle in satisfaction or recommendation scores. If anything
the Foundation should be exceeding market rate to make up for its
inability to provide equity participation plans for retirement savings
which commercial firms can offer.
As a charity the foundation has a responsibility to balance hiring the best
talent with spending too frivolously.
So the foundation should NOT throw money at staff without showing that
paying extra would bring the charity significant increases in value.
I know programmers on a par with my talent who are perfectly content
earning significantly less than I do. So this is not a case of "the best
costs the most".
Richard Symonds wrote:
>
> I would object to the precedent being set that donors from around the
> world, however old or young, are able to directly decide the salaries
of
staff at
the WMF....
I am not suggesting allowing donors to set salary levels, only to
express their opinions as to whether they would object to the
Foundation meeting market labor pay, or exceeding it to compensate for
the inability to offer equity participation. Since the only objections
raised against competitive pay have been that it would be an
"irresponsible" use of donor's money, why not find out from the
donor's whether they actually share that view? The worst that could
happen would be that we would find that donors agree with the status
quo.
I would also have an issue with donors being
bombarded with emails...
A representative sample of 384 donors is sufficient to establish the
answer with 95% confidence. I am not suggesting asking all however
many million there have been.
I call this number the magic 384, it's a common rookie mistake when
designing surveys for a million people.
With a sample size of 384 you do get 95% confidence, with a confidence
interval of 5%. So the data is fairly meaningless (if 49% of your
respondents say X then that could represent anything from 44 to 54 percent
of the population).
You need around 12000 for any solid degree of confidence. And I believe we
have a lot more than a million donors across a wide variety of cultures.
Please don't just throw out numbers like this unless you know what you are
taking about.
Tom
we should be saving our 'communication
points' for something more
important.
What might be more important that we haven't already asked in donor
surveys of years past?
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