It's about every employee in the country getting one and no one in your company getting one because your employer is morally opposed. If the whole country is getting Ferraris, that creates an overwhelming expectation.
Except
1 - You wouldn't reasonably have such an expectation when you work for an organization. that is strongly and publically against the "Ferrari"/coverage.
2 - The whole country isn't getting such coverage. Many people have jobs without any coverage, or with coverage that doesn't include prescription drug benefits. Possibly others have prescription drug benefits without coverage of contraception (and that certainly was true in the not too distant past).
That's like your company announcing that there will be no COLA this year.
Or the $10K pay cut I was forced to take awhile back on a previous job. Which is of course a much bigger issue than the COLA, let alone the coverage. But I still wouldn't say I was imposed on. (Treated shabbily? I guess, but not tremendously so, I could have always left, and the cut was an effort to avoid layoffs. I should have taken it as a sign, and gotten out ASAP, not just because I could probably have made at least some of it back, but because when they get to that point, the layoffs are often just delayed.)
Too late to change jobs
To late to get a COLA for that year perhaps, but I don't quite understand "too late to change jobs".
One of the potential ways of getting around this problem, optics wise and in reality, would be for those employers not offering the benefit to compensate with cash, which the employee could use for contraception, diapers, beer, the movies, or whatever.
I think they do that. In a perfect textbook market they would be doing that in each and every case. Obviously the employment market is not a perfect no-friction market, but still generally to the extent you get less benefits, all else being equal you get more money. Of course the background functioning of the job market, and elasticity of supply and demand in compensation, don't exactly present good "optics". They could explicitly do so, and make it an additional declared bonus or raise, and the optics might be better (to the extent that not providing such coverage is giving them an optics problem in addition to the legal problem, not just a legal problem). The effective raise would be small enough ($10 to $60 a month maybe) that it wouldn't be a severe problem for most employers, and reduced employment at the margin would likely be minimal. Assuming its a raise at all the extra bonus would likely, at least over time, reduce the pre-bonus compensation, so it would be a sham in real terms, all about the optics, nothing else. And I'm not even totally sure about the optics. Those pushing hardest for the insurance coverage want the coverage. They want to win this, not compromise, and they want to push the idea that having it covered is somehow a right. Without their buy in the optics might not improve much. I imagine from the church's perspective the optics of the "we're not going to pay for contraception, but here's extra money that you could use to pay for contraception if you want to bonus" aren't good. Most of the people not already on a side on this probably wouldn't care.
And in reality "the extra money you could use to pay for this" is their current salary. My perspective is more economics orientated then most, but to me the optics of a sham are not that good. People who are relatively economically ignorant might not notice it as being a sham, but would I think either think its not enough and continue on the attack, think its bad because they consider it caving and paying for the contraception, or (probably the biggest group) not really care about the effort (some of that last group wouldn't care about the whole controversy, others would care about the big issue, but not consider this effort at optics significant). |
