Author: Site Staff

In Britain, long the home of publicly funded health care, the health system may be taking on a more private-sector look, with employers potentially picking up more of the tab.

Top government officials are discussing a policy proposal known as “top-ups” for the National Health Service in England and Wales, which would allow insurers to offer NHS patients coverage for treatment, particularly expensive drugs, not covered by the service.

Sometimes paid by employers as an employee benefit, private medical insurance supplements NHS services in the United Kingdom. However, current practice requires that once patients seek care outside the NHS, they must continue to receive all care for that condition outside NHS facilities. If authorized, the NHS top-up plan would aim to pay for uncovered treatments while patients still receive the remainder of care from the NHS.

“It’s a whole new market that hasn’t been explored yet,” said Philip Blackburn, senior economist at health care consultant Laing & Buisson Ltd. in London. “It will change the landscape.

“It remains to be seen how much extra money the consumer has for health care,” he added. “The market is unlikely to explode overnight. It will be digested gradually.”

Alan Johnson, the government minister in charge of health care, has asked Mike Richards, the Department of Health’s national clinical director for cancer, to review the proposal and report back in October.

According to a July report from Laing & Buisson, 4.2 million people in the United Kingdom purchased health insurance policies or enrolled in self-insured employer plans at the beginning of 2008, a rise of 1.3 percent over 2007. Those plans covered nearly 7.5 million people, or 12.3 percent of the population. Individual policies shrank by 0.5 percent while corporate demand rose 2.3 percent, according to the report.

Cancer treatment is at the nexus of the debate over top-ups. Some drugs licensed for marketing within the United Kingdom are barred from NHS use on cost-effectiveness grounds established by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence. The agency evaluates clinical trial data on drugs and other medical technologies and assesses their cost-effectiveness as measured in British pounds per quality-adjusted life year, or a year of good health.

Drugs that cost less than 20,000 pounds, or $37,168, per quality-adjusted life year are usually judged as cost-effective. Those that cost 30,000 pounds, or $55,752, or more are unlikely to be approved. Those that fall between require additional evidence and scrutiny, according to a spokesman for the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence.

Most recently, the agency drafted a decision that proposed barring NHS patients with advanced or metastatic kidney cancer from having access to Sutent and three other cancer-treatment drugs. Sutent costs more than 3,000 pounds for a six-week cycle; while it increased the length of time some patients survived without any disease progression, it did not meet the cost-effectiveness threshold.

Ignoring current practice, one company has already jumped into the top-up market. Armed with a legal opinion in favor of top-ups that was written by a government attorney, Taunton, England-based Western Provident Association, a nonprofit insurer, in April 2007 began offering a plan covering up to 50,000 pounds of cancer medications. The annual premium is the policyholder’s age plus a 5 percent tax.

Six weeks ago, the association began offering a more comprehensive plan that covers an array of preventive and routine care costs, including a 200-pound payment each time a policyholder has a child. An option allows adding cancer drugs to the policy.

“All we’re trying to do is complement the gaps in the NHS,” a company spokesman said. “Whatever [the government] decides in October, it’s an opportunity for us. We’re ahead of the curve. We will evolve the policy if we need to.”

The spokesman would not disclose how many people purchased such policies.

For employers, the potential change in government policy gives them a chance to re-evaluate the health benefits they provide, restructure how they are provided and how they are financed—whether through employer contributions or salary deductions, especially if top-up coverage costs less than traditional medical insurance.

“If you’re effectively self-funding the medical plan, it allows you to say, `Let’s let people get coverage from the NHS for the things that NHS does well, and we’ll supply some sort of supplementary coverage for the things people have to wait for,’ ” said Paul Ashcroft, a principal at Mercer who heads the company’s London-based health and benefits office. “It may open up those sorts of discussions.”

Structuring a new plan with wider access to benefits also means employee-benefit managers need to understand more about the health marketplace and how it affects their programs.

“Be aware of what’s out there in the clinical world, what drugs are coming on the market and how they work,” said Elliott Hurst, senior consultant for health care and risk consulting with Watson Wyatt Worldwide in London. “From the financial perspective, you’ve got to a keep a close eye on your claims expenses and trends in the demographics of your group…. Try to paint a picture of what the implications are if you take a particular stance on a particular drug.”

Benefit managers also need to be aware of how their program structure affects health services.

“The liability to you needs to be clear,” said Fiona Harris, Staines, England-based head of personal markets with the British United Provident Association. “You don’t want somebody halfway through the [treatment] process and have a conflict.”

Finally, managers of employee benefit plans need to think about how they communicate changes in plans, particularly if they choose to jettison or reduce cancer coverage should the NHS supplement become available.

“It’s potentially quite a difficult message,” Mercer’s Ashcroft said.

Filed by Jonathan Gardner of Business Insurance-Europe, a sister publication of Workforce Management. To comment, e-mail editors@workforce.com.

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The Labor Department has proposed to dramatically open the door for mutual funds and other investment companies to offer investment advice directly to participants in defined-contribution plans.

Fund companies long have been effectively barred from offering direct advice to participants because of fears that the advisors might steer participants to the companies’ own investment options.

But under a proposed class exemption published in the Federal Register on August 22, the Department of Labor would allow an investment company’s employees to offer one-on-one advice directly, as long as the employee’s compensation doesn’t depend on the investment options selected by the participant, and the advice meets other key conditions. (The proposal can be viewed here.)

The Pension Protection Act of 2006 included a provision intended to provide limited leeway for plan participants to receive investment advice, but the proposed exemption takes it further.

Proponents of the proposed class exemption, backed by Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio, insist that DOL action is needed to provide investment advisors with meaningful relief from the advice prohibitions.

“Americans deserve face-to-face, personally tailored advice on a range of investment options to meet their own unique needs,” Boehner said in a release. The proposed exemption “is a major step toward giving workers that.” Calls to Boehner’s office for additional comment were not returned by press time.

Critics, however, said the new proposal goes far beyond the relief envisioned by the pension law.

One key problem is that it would open the door for conflicts of interest and then rely on after-the-fact enforcement efforts to ferret out abuses.

“This is blind to the way ethics sometime play out in the marketplace,” said Norman Stein, a professor of law at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, and senior advisor to the Pension Rights Center in Washington.

“We all know that there will be winks and nods and bonuses that will be discretionary. If conflicts are possible, they’re going to happen.”

Rep. George Miller, D-California, chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, said in a release: “The rules proposed by the [DOL] are nothing more than a boon for Wall Street and corporate executives, and I urge the department to immediately withdraw these harmful proposals.” Miller was in Denver last week for the Democratic National Convention and could not be reached for further comment.

“The Bush administration is proposing to further tip the scales toward special interests by opening the door to conflicts of interest among the very consultants purporting to offer unbiased investment advice, and potentially allowing companies to reap windfall profits at the expense of American workers,” Miller added.

Still, supporters of the proposed class exemption argue the DOL has provided adequate safeguards to protect the interests of plan participants.

“I think with the care that has gone on with developing and balancing these rules that this concern [about conflicts of interest] may start to diminish or maybe even disappear,” said Andrew Oringer, an ERISA attorney for New York-based law firm White & Case.

Supporters of the proposed class exemption said that department intervention is needed to provide meaningful advice relief. The advice provisions of the PPA provided too little relief to be of much value, they maintain.

Under one reading of the new law, mutual fund employees could provide the advice only if all of the mutual fund’s investment options were offered at the same price, regardless of whether they are, for example, active or passive.

In a Field Assistance Bulletin issued February 2, 2007, the DOL, however, interpreted the new law to mean the fee-leveling requirement did not apply to a fund’s investment options if the fund’s advice provider worked for a separate affiliate of the fund and the fees received by the separate affiliate didn’t vary depending on the selection of the investment options.

ERISA attorneys say the August 22 proposed class exemption proposes to extend the relief from fee leveling to firms that don’t operate their investment advice and investment management services through separate affiliates.

“The class exemption is a helpful effort by the Department of Labor to rationalize the investment advice structure Congress created with the Pension Protection Act,” said Jason Bortz, an ERISA attorney for Davis & Harman in Washington.

“The net result is it’s going to be a lot easier for plan participants to get investment advice and a lot easier for advisors to give investment advice to the largest possible group of people,” said Melanie Nussdorf, a partner at the law firm Steptoe & Johnson in Washington.

DOL officials say the exemption would make it easier for defined-contribution plan participants and individual retirement account holders to get personalized investment advice.

But the proposal comes with a number of strings attached.

It essentially says that advice would be OK if offered through computer models independently certified to be unbiased or if the compensation of the advisor providing one-on-one consultation doesn’t vary depending on the investments selected based on the advice.

The proposed exemption also would permit advisors to provide participants with follow-up advice if the participants want more options than those offered by a computer model.

To qualify as an “eligible investment advice arrangement,” under the proposed exemption, advice also would have to rely on “generally accepted” investment theories and take into account the participant’s retirement age, risk tolerance and investment preferences.

In addition, to qualify as an eligible investment advice arrangement, the arrangement must be expressly approved by a plan fiduciary and audited at least annually. The manager also must disclose to participants all fees or compensation that the manager or its affiliates might receive and keep records on the advice for at least six years.

Despite the fact that the department’s proposed class exemption would allow major mutual fund companies to offer their own advice, it’s unclear how the ruling will affect existing advice providers.

The class exemption could stimulate interest in the proprietary advice programs offered by Vanguard Group Inc., said Dennis Simmons, a principal in Vanguard’s ERISA and fiduciary services team.

“At the end of the day, it will help our advice programs because plan sponsors will have a clear road map in confirming that the programs are consistent with ERISA,” he said.

Nonetheless, Simmons said Malvern, Pennsylvania-based Vanguard planned to continue offering interested plan sponsors the independent third-party advice services of Palo Alto-based California Financial Engines Inc.

At T. Rowe Price Retirement Plan Services Inc. in Baltimore, officials have no plans to provide direct advice. “Right now, we expect to continue with our existing model” of using third-party providers, said spokesman Brian Lewbart.

A spokesman for Fidelity Investments in Boston had no comment.

Peng Chen, president of Chicago-based Ibbotson Associates said there still will be a place for independent advice providers. “A lot of record keepers and plan sponsors will continue preferring third parties because of the independence and experience and the potential cost savings a firm like Ibbotson can bring to the table,” he said.

As of June 30, Chicago-based Morningstar Inc. subsidiaries Morningstar Associates and Ibbotson Associates were providing third-party computer-model advice to 15.6 million retirement plan participants through 136,000 plan sponsors and 29 plan providers, according to Courtney Goethals Dobrow, a Morningstar spokeswoman.

Comments on the proposed class exemption, along with a related proposed regulation, are due October 6. They can be emailed to e-ORI@dol.gov.

Filed by Doug Halonen Pensions & Investments, a sister publication of Workforce Management. To comment, e-mail editors@workforce.com.

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The hard times facing the marketing industry may be only temporary, but so, it turns out, are a lot of the jobs.

With an increasing number of companies looking to reduce the full-time headcounts in their marketing departments, and a glut of experienced baby boomers available to do consulting stints, a growing number of marketers are looking to fill brand manager, project leader and even marketing director positions with short-term employees.

A trend tracker on Indeed.com, a search engine that scans U.S. job listings throughout the Internet, shows a sharp spike since May on listings that include the word “temporary” in ads seeking marketing managers, directors and researchers. The spike punctuates a general uptick in such marketing listings relative to all postings since 2005.

The percentage of online job listings containing the words “temporary,” “marketing” and “director” surged roughly 50 percent between May 1 and July 31, according to Indeed.com, even though the trend line for just “marketing” and “director” remained flat during the period.

“I’m finding a lot more companies now are [using] contract employees and consultants at the higher-level jobs, such as director of marketing and senior brand managers,” said Michael Carrillo, president of CPG Jobs, which operates the job site CPGjoblist. He also works as a recruiter.

While the move is clearly aimed at controlling headcounts and cutting costs, Carrillo said he believes demographic factors are at play, such as baby-boomer employees who are downsized out of positions but aren’t ready to retire and have valuable experience.

Broad range of marketer
A variety of firms specialize in the burgeoning area, including conventional temporary service firms such as Kelly Services and Manpower. They’re seeing temporary marketing jobs on the rise even as temporary employment overall has declined steadily since early 2007 because of the slowing economy.

The surge appears to be coming from a surprisingly broad array of marketers, as well as old and new media.

An ad last week from Creative Group, a unit of Robert Half International, for an unnamed Southern California beauty marketer seeks a marketing director for a temporary assignment possibly converting to full-time—and offers someone with eight-plus years of industry experience $50 to $60 an hour.

Apparently the same Southern California beauty marketer seeks to round out the team with a product development manager at $20 to $30 an hour, a bilingual media planner at $25 to $35 an hour and a “marketing guru” at $43 to $50 an hour. Creative Group stands to be the employer of the outsourced team.

Media companies also appear to be stepping up temporary hires. Among temporary positions advertised online: a sales and marketing coordinator for Time Warner’s Health.com; a marketing program manager for EchoStar’s Sling Media, marketer of SlingBox; and a site manager whose duties would include marketing of a national portal and social networking site from Gannett Digital, MomsLikeMe.

“Everybody is looking at headcount and ways to reduce it,” said Joe Hawley, who helped lead the turnaround of Doctor’s Dermatologic Formula for two years before the business was sold to Procter & Gamble Co. last year.

The veteran of Avon Products, Unilever and Liz Claiborne is now working as a consultant with his own firm, Hawley Global Partners. While he’s open to another permanent position, he’s also plying a series of consulting gigs and believes marketing—
and even general management functions—increasingly will be outsourced in the way information technology and human resources positions have been in recent years.

Most of these marketers aren’t contractors directly through the employer, he said, but through third-party firms such as Aquent, which specializes in providing temporary marketing industry help from its own pool of permanent employees and says it serves 90 of the Fortune 100 corporations.

The downside
“You’ll look at a company and not be able to tell who’s a contract employee, who’s [a permanent employee] from a third-party resource and who’s [an employee of] the company,” Hawley said.

Of course, the downside can be quality, said Dave Gallagher, president of Boyden, an Atlanta-based executive search firm.

“Nobody is going to leave their job,” he said, “to be a 90-day temp contractor.”

But Hawley said temps aren’t always getting worse deals, and some can even be of higher quality.

“I call it rent to buy,” he said, adding that many of the positions have permanent potential, sometimes involve equity stakes or efforts to bypass corporate salary caps, and can attract people with broader or more current experience than permanent employees.

Filed by Jack Neff of Advertising Age, a sister publication of Workforce Management. To comment, e-mail editors@workforce.com.

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A dispute between health insurance companies in California and brokers could end a practice favored by small employers to save money on health coverage.

The feud centers on employers’ funding of health reimbursement arrangements with high-deductible health plans. Normally, high-deductible plans are used with health savings accounts, which are owned by employees and often partially funded by the employer to help defray an employee’s health care costs.

Health reimbursement arrangements, on the other hand, are like accounts but are managed and owned by the employer rather than the individual. Instead of depositing a lump sum of cash into an individual’s health savings account, employers simply pay for health care claims as they occur. Employers save money if an employee does not use the full amount offered by an employer in the HRA.

But health insurers in California say the practice, which is being sold by brokers to employers as a way to cut costs, undermines the way they’ve priced high-deductible health plans, essentially turning them into inexpensive low-deductible plans.

In a letter to brokers, Health Net of California wrote: “Key to our ability to provide these plans is the principle that higher deductibles and out-of-pocket maximums will encourage members to be more aware of and cautious in their utilizations of services.”

Beginning in March 2006, Health Net said it would not pay brokers a commission if an employer offered health reimbursement arrangements with high-deductible plans intended to be used with health savings accounts. Health Net then asked employers to sign an “Employer Acknowledgement Form” promising, in effect, not to use HRAs.

Other insurers, including Kaiser Permanente and Blue Shield of California, have sent similar warnings to brokers, according to letters sent by health insurers to brokers and reviewed by Workforce Management. The plans generally affect employers covering as many as 500 people, though some of the plans are specifically targeted to employers with as few as 50 employees.

The CEO of the state’s health insurance advocacy group says health plans can offer high-deductible plans with lower premiums because they encourage members to spend less on health care. Chris Ohman, CEO of the California Association of Health Plans, says insurers are concerned that HRAs with these plans will upset that balance, causing utilization—and premiums—to go up. Although insurers say such a scenario has not occurred, their efforts to penalize brokers for selling HRAs, known generally as wraparound products, are meant to keep HSA plans affordable.

“These wraparound schemes run the risk of destroying these premium products,” Ohman said. “It’s not sustainable, it’s not appropriate, and it’s not fair.”

Brokers say this is a way for health insurance companies to protect their margins at the expense of employers.

“The insurance carriers are hard-nosed because they feel they could be losing revenue,” said Linda Jacobs, a broker in Campbell, California. “It’s a disservice to employers because the HRA is a better buy, so they’ve had to comply with what the health insurance carrier wants, not with what’s best for their company.”

Raj Singh, a broker with Expert Quote in San Jose, California, says he sells the plans to remain competitive because he knows employers are looking for ways to save money. But the conflict has sown confusion among employers and brokers about whether the practice is legitimate.

Mark Reynolds, president of Visalia, California-based health benefits administrator Benelect, says insurers are violating state insurance law by keeping brokers from performing their fiduciary duty to employers.

Molly DeFrank, a spokeswoman for the state’s insurance commissioner, said California is “reviewing the issue,” but that the practice is not common.

Health insurers say employers who want to offer HRAs should purchase high-deductible plans that are meant to be used with them.

As Blue Cross of California told brokers in a May letter, it “is the only plan appropriately priced” to reflect the increased spending the insurer believes will occur when employers offset the cost of a high-deductible plan with an HRA.

—By Jeremy Smerd

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San Francisco regulators have provided further guidance on how to comply with a controversial ordinance that imposes a health care spending requirement on employers.

The latest guidance, which was issued in response to questions from employers, clarifies how much employees must earn in order for them to qualify as exempt employees, for whom employers do not have to make the required contributions.

Under the law, which was passed in 2006, employers with at least 100 employees must make in 2008 a health care contribution of $1.76 per hour per covered employee, while employers with 20 to 99 employees must make a contribution of $1.17 per hour per covered employee. Employers with fewer than 20 employees are excluded from the spending mandate.

The law, which went into effect earlier this year pending the outcome of a challenge in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, gives employers a choice of several options—such as payment of group health insurance premiums or contributions to employees’ health savings accounts—to satisfy the spending contribution requirement.

The spending requirement, though, does not apply to several categories of exempt employees, including those managers and supervisors earning more than $76,851 in 2008.

In the latest guidance, San Francisco regulators said the $76,851 figure refers to individuals’ base salary and that bonuses and overtime should be excluded in determining whether the employee has hit the cutoff.

Additionally, regulators say the $76,851 annual earnings figure applies not only to compensation actually earned, but also to entitled salary.

For example, an employee hired as a manager in December and who has a base annual salary of $120,000 would be excluded in employer calculations even though the individual would have earned only $10,000 for that employer in 2008.

Filed by Jerry Geisel of Business Insurance, a sister publication of Workforce Management. To comment, e-mail editors@workforcecom.

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Workplace homicides and assaults are continuing a downward trend, according to NCCI Holdings Inc., a provider of workers’ compensation and injury data.

Homicides dropped 25 percent between 2000 and 2006 and are down 61 percent since 1992, Boca Raton, Florida-based NCCI said.

Workplace assaults have been more volatile on a year-to-year basis. Assaults that resulted in injuries causing lost time from work declined 18 percent in 2005 but increased 10 percent in 2006. But for 1999 through 2006, the assaults declined at an annual average rate of 0.6 percent, NCCI said.

Crime-related claims have higher medical and indemnity severity than other claims because injuries stemming from crime tend to be more serious, NCCI said.

Robberies are connected with 70 percent of workplace homicides, with victims tending to work primarily in jobs that involve direct customer contact and easy access to valuables such as cash.

Filed by Roberto Ceniceros of Business Insurance, a sister publication of Workforce Management. To comment, e-mail editors@workforce.com.

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When Congress returns from its summer break next week, it will enter the home stretch of the legislative year.

One bill that could find itself on the Senate fast track would expand protection against workplace discrimination for people with disabilities.
The measure, which passed the House 402-17 in late June, clarifies that Congress meant for the Americans with Disabilities Act to be broadly interpreted. The original measure, which became law in the early 1990s, required employers to make accommodations for disabled employees.

The new bill, the ADA Amendments Act, addresses Supreme Court decisions that critics say restricted the law. The court ruled in several cases that mitigating measures—such as medication or a prosthesis—make a person ineligible for coverage.

In an unusual show of cooperation, disability advocates and the business lobby compromised on the final bill, ensuring broad House support.

The Senate measure has 64 co-sponsors, four more than necessary to avoid a filibuster. The bipartisan momentum may prompt Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, to schedule a vote as early as this week.

“Reid is looking for a short list of doables,” says Mike Aitken, director of government relations for the Society for Human Resource Management, one of the groups backing the bill. “They’re going to bring up things that there is broad consensus on.”

Both the House and Senate versions reiterate that the definition of a disability is a physical or mental impairment that “substantially limits” one or more major life activities. They also increase the number of activities covered, add a category of bodily functions and allow workers to sue if they are “regarded as” disabled.

The House bill defines “substantially limits” as “materially restricts.” In an effort to garner more support, the Senate avoids such sharpening of the language.

“Instead, the bill takes several specific and general steps that, individually and in combination, direct courts toward a more generous meaning and application of the definition,” Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, said in a Congressional Record statement.

Differences between the House and Senate bills won’t slow down the measure, says Dan Yager, senior vice president and general counsel of the HR Policy Association.

“Our hope is that they could get something off to the president fairly quickly,” Yager says.

The lack of a specific definition of “substantially limits” in the Senate measure, however, could require courts to step in again.

“At the center of the continuum, the question [of who is disabled] is probably straightforward,” says Neil Abramson, a partner at the law firm Proskauer Rose in New York.
 
“At the margins, it’s more difficult. That will probably generate, at least in the beginning, litigation,” he says.

HR departments will have to be fastidious about ensuring that language in employee files pertains only to performance so that it doesn’t become fodder for disability lawsuits.

“It’s going to require a fairly diligent HR function,” Abramson says. “The nuances are fairly complicated and will be fairly significant as this plays out.”

—Mark Schoeff Jr.

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Lawyers are following bankers, as usual—right out the door.

In the wake of massive layoffs on Wall Street, law firms have been quietly letting go of staffers whose services are no longer needed now that financial deals have dried up. The targeted layoffs that began late last year have turned into a torrent that will likely continue into 2009.

As many as 200 New York-based attorneys from a dozen of the country’s top law firms have lost their jobs in the past year. An even higher number of paralegals, secretaries and other support personnel have also been axed. Some firms are postponing the start dates of new associates in an effort to save money, since their salaries average about $160,000.

“This has not been a great year for law firms,” said Aniello Bianco, senior vice president at legal consulting firm Hildebrandt International. “When you have people who are not busy and you don’t anticipate them becoming busy, law firms have to trim.”

Law firms’ Manhattan offices are feeling a disproportionate impact because of the Wall Street-heavy origins of this economic slowdown.

Last month, for example, Manhattan-based Fried Frank Harris Shriver & Jacobson laid off about 60 administrative employees, or nearly 10 percent of its staff.

London-based Clifford Chance jump-started the layoffs in November when it cut a handful of its New York structured-finance associates. A few weeks later, Manhattan-based Thacher Proffitt & Wood announced it was laying off 24 local associates from the same group.

Manhattan’s Cadwalader Wickersham & Taft let go of 35 lawyers at the beginning of the year and eliminated dozens more over the following few months, ultimately shedding 131 of its 720 attorneys. Thelen Reid Brown Raysman & Steiner followed suit, dropping 26 associates and 85 staffers. The New York office was hit the hardest because it housed much of the firm’s litigation, construction and finance practices.

Some firms are delaying new hires’ start dates in order to save money on salaries. WolfBlock told its incoming class of associates that instead of starting this week, they should report for work in November. To discourage them from seeking employment elsewhere, the firm is paying them a modest stipend of $2,500 per month.

The magnitude of the economic slowdown caught many firms’ managing partners by surprise.

“We just didn’t anticipate that things would spiral down to the extent that they have,” said Frank Burch, joint chief executive of DLA Piper.

“I don’t think you’re going to see a lot of aggressive expansion of legal professionals anytime in the near future,” he added, “though there will be a small number of smart firms that will get the timing right.”

To that end, firms whose success is not tied to high finance are cherry-picking talent that competitors are losing. Burch, for one, just hired eight partners away from Thelen Reid last week, including the real estate department chair.

“New York is the most competitive legal market in the world,” said Jack Zaremski, president of legal recruiting firm Hanover Legal. “For a law firm, either you’re swimming well or you’re sinking.”

There are job opportunities for laid-off attorneys willing to relocate, said Margie Grossberg, a partner at legal staffing firm Major Lindsey & Africa and co-leader of the firm’s associate practice.

“If people are willing to go to other cities, plenty of law firms are happy to talk to lawyers with New York ‘Big Law’ experience,” she said.

Attorney Eric Storz was among the lucky ones.

One of the batch of first-year associates laid off from Thelen Reid in March, the former CPA spent four months job hunting, eventually landing a job at the New York office of Sullivan & Worcester. The midsize Boston firm was not battered by the credit crisis.

When Storz first started looking several months ago, the landscape seemed bleak.

“I was able to garner interviews because I had past experience as a CPA,” he said. “But I’ve heard other people have had a harder time.”

Filed by Hilary Potkewitz of Crain’s New York Business, a sister publication of Workforce Management. To comment, e-mail editors@workforce.com.

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Several groups attending the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, this week have serious concerns about elections—but not the presidential kind.

The groups are worried about the controversial card-check legislation pending in Congress. The proposal would give unions the ability to organize at a company simply by having workers sign a card rather than voting in a secret ballot.

Many Republican leaders worry that a Barack Obama victory in November will lead to passage of the bill. Obama supports the bill; his opponent, Republican John McCain, does not.

The card-check proposal stokes passions on both sides of the political divide. Unions say their organizing efforts are often hamstrung by aggressive anti-union efforts by companies, including worker intimidation. Corporations say unions use the card-check method to make employees offers they can’t refuse—and do it while off company premises.

Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union, said in an interview with Financial Week, a sister publication of Workforce Management, that business attacks against the bill have twisted reality, making the method seem undemocratic.

“It’s amazing that American corporations are now the defenders of democracy in the United States,” Stern said, “even though they are the supporters of communism in China.”

The Employee Free Choice Act passed the House in March 2007 by a margin of nearly 60 votes, but was later held up by a threatened filibuster in the Senate. Democrats failed to secure the 60 votes necessary to block the filibuster, but they did get Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pennsylvania, to side with them in the 51-48 vote. Business groups now worry that if Democrats pick up several more seats in the Senate, they will have enough votes to pass the card-check legislation.

As it stands, groups like the National Association of Manufacturers—which staunchly opposes card-check certification—view the House as the best battleground to stymie the bill. And they say they are making inroads.

Some House Democrats “say they’ve seen the light,” said Jay Timmons, executive vice president at the association. “There was some buyer’s remorse among some members.”

One concern, Timmons said, is that lawmakers might face a backlash from constituents if workers feel threatened by union members looking to corral votes outside of a secret election.

“It’s simply undemocratic,” he said.

Stern disputes the assertion, saying, “The House is very comfortable with what they passed, the candidates are very comfortable with what the bill says.”

One thing’s for sure: This election cycle is turning into a battle royal between business interests and unions.

At the SEIU’s Take Back Labor Day music festival in St. Paul on Monday, hip-hop artist Imani and Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello spoke alongside Stern, urging concert-goers to sign petitions supporting the card-check legislation.

Union officials at the festival also set up a giant banner calling for universal health care. The sign was clearly visible from the Xcel Energy Center, where the Republican convention is being held.

“Big labor is flexing its muscle,” Timmons said, referring to the reported $50 million the AFL-CIO was said to be spending to get out the vote in November. He added that businesses eager to get workers to the polls are “hobbled” by election laws that bar companies from giving workers a day off to vote or busing employees to voting locations.

Filed by Nicholas Rummell of Financial Week, a sister publication of Workforce Management. To comment, e-mail editors@workforce.com.

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A growing number of companies are finding that there’s a pretty simple way to avoid taking heat about lucrative fringe benefits dished out to top executives: Just pull the plug on perks.

Now that the Securities and Exchange Commission requires companies to disclose executive benefits valued at more than $10,000, large corporations are shedding some of the smaller—yet most frequently offered—fringe benefits provided to their top officers.

“Many companies find it easier to eliminate perquisites than to continue to try to explain why they are needed,” said Alex Cwirko-Godycki, research manager at Equilar, a compensation consulting firm.

Financial-planning and country-club fees appear to be the executive privileges that most companies are chopping from their CEO compensation packages. Only about 62 percent of Fortune 100 companies disclosed that their chief executives received some sort of financial-planning benefit last year, according to data from Equilar, down from 74 percent in 2006.

Even those companies that continued to pay for their CEO’s financial planning—which could include tax preparation services—pared down what they were willing to fork out for such services. The median value of financial-planning benefits declined 9.2 percent last year, to $15,575, according to Equilar.

While paying for club memberships was less prevalent, fewer companies are now footing such bills for their CEOs, with 26.3 percent of companies disclosing that they offered the perk in 2007, down from 28 percent in 2006.

More telling, perhaps, is how much companies are now willing to pay for these dues: The median value of club membership perks awarded to CEOs last year was $3,996, a 64 percent drop from the $11,070 in median club dues Fortune 100 companies paid to their CEOs in 2006.

Filed by Mark Bruno of Financial Week, a sister publication of Workforce Management. To comment, e-mail editors@workforce.com.

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