Interesting article here authored by Maria O’Brien Hylton: “The Changing World of Employee Benefits.” Opening excerpt:
When I graduated from law school in 1985, there were no courses offered in employee benefits law. Nor, as near as I can recall, was ERISA ever discussed in any of the labor and employment classes I took. There was no mention in the introductory labor law course or in other classes about employment discrimination, union organizing, and employment arbitration. Now, in contrast, many law schools include a course on employee benefits and ERISA, and students hoping to work in the labor and employment area frequently find that ERISA work is plentiful, and traditional NLRA work is not. This, of course, reflects larger changes in the market for legal services. . .
At the end of her article, the author makes a recommendation that willing employers and employees be allowed to bargain for “compensation arrangements that are now impermissible because of minimum wage and overtime laws” so that “employees who wanted to could ‘purchase’ health insurance with a specified number of hours of uncompensated overtime or with a lower hourly wage.” She suggests that such “arrangements would be attractive to dual earner households; in effect one might work for wages and the other for benefits.”
Of course, it goes without saying that the outlook of the single earner household (and of many today who must pay more and more of their income to cover the skyrocketing costs of health insurance) is rather bleak–presenting a choice of either having enough to live on or or having adequate medical care.