"Industry average"

We had the annual benefits meeting at my workplace this month, where the HR guru from corporate dropped in to explain the latest changes to the insurance arrangements. The news was less bad this year than in previous memorable meetings, but a lot of the same obtuse catchphrases reappeared, including the dreadful "industry average."

Some background: Once upon a time, I was hired. Dinosaurs roamed the earth. Well, it wasn't that long ago, but we did get point-of-service (POS) type health insurance coverage for employee premiums of zero. It was one of the factors that brought me to the company, offsetting the rock-bottom salary offer. This benefit, like several others since, eroded considerably. First step was to make only HMO-type coverage premium-free; if you still wanted POS, you had to scare up some out-of-pocket. The next year, everyone had to pay some portion of premiums. Over the following years, the portion of the premium that the employees had to come up with was steadily enlarged.

So you see what the net effect is. The underlying premiums are increasing, sometimes at double-digit rates. But at the same time the company is making you pay an even larger fraction of that premium. So year to year, the premium being deducted from the paycheck was increasing twenty or thirty percent! So you'd get a raise in the summer quarter, hopefully. Come winter quarter you'd get the un-raise, where the company would take back a chunk of what they'd given you earlier. A darkly comedic money dance.

But it's the HR blather that really gets my goat. "We are targeting a twenty-eighty employee contribution, which is in line with the industry average." "Office co-pays are increasing fifty percent, putting them closer to the industry average." To put it bluntly, if I had known I was joining an "industry average" obsessed company, perhaps I should have restrained myself over the years and put forth a more "industry average" effort. When the CEO comes to rally us, I don't recall him asking for and expecting average performance. For heaven's sake, the word "leading" is right under our company logo on the website. Wonder whether HR ever noticed that.

Now, being both employees and stockholders, most of my coworkers can understand fiscal necessity. We can understand restraining spending and curtailing benefits to present a picture of responsibility to the institutional investors and other important ownership blocs. But "approaching the industry average" is a direction, not a justification, and the highly-educated (and correspondingly irritable) engineering pool knows that. The HR panjandrums should learn the difference, otherwise in a not-too-distant meeting one shall receive such a magnificent verbal wedgie that the HR flack will go gimping back to corporate with the world's first and only Fruit-of-the-Loom brand do-rag.