I much rather have higher pay, yea the insurance is great but it doesn’t pay a mortgage or rent which has almost doubled in cost over the last 10 years. If you bought a house during the last downturn YOUR mortgage is now low but that exact same house cost 2x as much now which isn’t affordable working at ZW.
I don’t have kids but if I did I would be perfectly fine paying $2000 for a baby with normal insurance if that meant I made $15k more a year from base pay. Hell if we had a decent High deductible with company HSA the out of pocket would be $0 and the cost of insurance for the year/years leading up to needing it would be less. I would go on a limb in say the one year of company/employee contributions to the insurance plan is more than the entirety of my medical care for the 30+ years of my life. Doesn’t sound like a decent trade off for me. We still need some insurance but decent high deductible plane with a high company contribution would save the company tons of money and after several years those youngins like me would have enough in the HSA to cover several years of max out of pocket deductible.
Just think, if someone came here at 20 and had an HSA where the company contributed $150 a Month to the HSA and the 200 to the actual high deductible plan said person would have $36k In their HSA by the time they are 40 which would cover 6 full years of max deductibles if that person ran into health problems. This is not accounting for a single penny contributed by the employee into the HSA. This would save the company about $500 a month at a minimum and cost the employee about $200 less a month in premiums. Think more money in the employees pocket to pay other bills.
But having insurance like this will never happen at ZW cause to many people are here just for the insurance, those that either have medical problems themself or their family members have medical problems. These are also the top 50% of the seniority list that need the insurance more than money for food, housing or student debt. I even flew with one guy who said he would take a pay cut to keep his insurance for his family due to complex medical issues. I really hope he the outlier.