Author: Site Staff

ING Group has agreed to acquire CitiStreet, the benefits services company owned by Citigroup and State Street, for $900 million.

CitiStreet provides record keeping and administrative services, advice programs and other benefit plan services primarily in the U.S. The company serves more than 16,000 plans and 12 million participants and has approximately 3,700 employees with the majority located in the U.S.

Earlier reports had pegged Bank of America as the most likely buyer of the benefits administrator.

But with the acquisition, ING vaults to near the top of the benefits services business. Indeed, the deal will make the Netherlands-based bank and insurer the third-largest defined-contribution service provider in the U.S., with $351 billion in assets under management and administration. After the deal, ING will serve 14 million defined-contribution plan participants.

The transaction also includes a defined-benefit/pension business in the U.S., a health and welfare business in the U.S. and a retirement services business in Australia.

ING indicated the deal will provide “significant operational synergies.” The bank expects the acquisition to be earnings-per-share accretive by 2010, excluding merger-related expenses and the amortization of customer-based intangible assets.

The purchase will be financed entirely from ING’s existing internal resources. The company’s management said the proposed acquisition will have no impact on ING’s ongoing share buy-back program.

The transaction is expected to close during the third quarter.

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

Morgan Stanley is planning its next round of layoffs, this time to the tune of 1,500.

The New York-based investment bank is finalizing a plan to cut another 5 percent of its workforce, across all business sectors and primarily in the United States. Brokers, who make money largely on a commission, will not be affected by the cuts.

Morgan has 46,000 employees, including 8,000 brokers.

“We are constantly evaluating business conditions to ensure we are right-sized and we continue to do that,” a Morgan spokesperson said.

The cutbacks come after Morgan has already announced a $9 billion write-down, primarily because of bad mortgage bets. The investment bank posted a mild rebound in the first quarter, even as fellow banks Citigroup and Merrill Lynch continued to struggle. Morgan reported net income of $1.5 billion during the first three months of the year, still a significant drop from $2.5 billion in the first quarter of 2007.

The job cuts are expected to start this week and continue through the end of June, and Morgan chief executive John Mack hopes these cuts will be the end of Morgan’s layoffs through 2008, according to CNBC. The company already cut about 2,800 employees, or 5 percent of its workforce, earlier this year.

Morgan is far from alone in the pink slip parade. Merrill Lynch recently announced plans to cut 3,000 employees, on top of the 1,100 it laid off earlier this year, and Citigroup will eliminate 9,000 jobs. CIT Group shrunk its workforce by 500, or 9 percent, during the first quarter, and Wachovia laid off 12 percent of its investment bankers. In addition, about half of Bear Stearns Cos.’ 14,000 employees stand to lose their jobs as JPMorgan Chase & Co. swallows their firm through the end of June.

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

Employers are coping with a growing number of laws that extend the age to which insured plans must offer coverage to employees’ adult dependent children.

While there is variation in these laws—which now have been passed in more than two dozen states—they generally require employer health plans to offer continued coverage for adult dependent children still living at home.

And while the cost is not generally considered significant, the laws do create administrative burdens for employers, particularly those with multistate operations.

Previously, these state laws, which do not apply to self-insured plans, generally required that health plans cover employees’ children up to age 19 if they did not attend college, or generally to 24 if they were full-time students. But measures that have been passed in recent years extend coverage in many cases to age 25 or 26. In New Jersey, coverage must be offered up to age 30, the oldest cutoff among states.

And in many cases, the laws no longer require the dependent to be a student. For example, legislation signed last week by Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear requires health plans to offer coverage for all young adults up to age 25. Previously, only students had to be covered up to that age.

Observers say the impetus behind the legislation is the large percentage of young adults that are uninsured. According to a 2007 study by the New York-based Commonwealth Fund, those ages 19 to 29 represent one of the largest and fastest-growing segments of the U.S. population without health insurance. In 2005, they accounted for 30 percent of the non-elderly uninsured even though they made up just 17 percent of the under-65 population, according to the study.

States regard these laws as a convenient way to address this issue without incurring any expense to themselves, observers say.

More legislation can be expected, said J.D. Piro, an attorney with Hewitt Associates Inc. in Norwalk, Connecticut.

“It’s a fairly easy fix—there’s no money required from the state and you can pass it on to the employers—so I wouldn’t be surprised to see more of this,” he said.

Joanne Hustead, Washington-based senior health compliance specialist-national compliance practice with the Segal Co., said, “A few of the laws say employers don’t have to pay for it, but most of them don’t even address that issue.”

On their face, these laws are not significantly costly to employers. Companies often pass on any additional premiums that result from complying with these laws to employees, observers say. Furthermore, young adults are a particularly healthy segment of the population and are less likely than other demographic groups to generate claims.

At the same time, such laws do increase the number of those covered, which will lead to at least some additional claims and ultimately some increased costs for employers.

Presumably, “it will cost more, but we haven’t seen how that’s broken out, at least in any kind of a direct way with respect to the expansion of coverage,” said Jay M. Kirschbaum, St. Louis-based national practice leader, legal and research group, for Willis North America Inc.

Depending on the experience, extending coverage for a longer period to employees’ older dependent children could lead to higher premiums, said Carol Tavella, senior manager with SMART Business Advisory & Consulting in Devon, Pennsylvania.

Even though this is not the most expensive group to insure, “it really takes only one really expensive” claim to seriously raise premiums, especially at small firms, said James Gelfand, senior manager-health policy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington.

“It certainly widens or opens the door to risk,” said Randall Abbott, a senior consultant with Watson Wyatt Worldwide in Wellesley Hills, Massachusetts. Some young people engage in “risky behaviors that can generate substantial health claims, so from that point of view I’m more concerned from a broader risk perspective than I am from an immediate cost basis,” Abbott said.

Bill Lindsay, president of the Lockton Benefits Group in Denver, said the laws also “create adverse selection, in that the state law appeals to those who have health conditions and can’t obtain coverage on their own.”

A bigger concern for employers is the additional administration under such laws, observers say.

Rich Stover, a principal with Buck Consultants in Secaucus, New Jersey, said that “just the basic tracking of all these laws and keeping up to date on what the requirements are is very, very difficult.”

At Golden, Colorado-based Coors Brewing Co., it took some effort to ensure employees were notified of the provisions of Colorado’s law, which took effect in 2006, said a spokeswoman. She said the number of those affected by the law, which the company is not tracking, has been low. The Colorado law allows employees’ dependent adult children to keep coverage until age 25, even if they are not enrolled in an educational institution, as long as they are unmarried and are financially dependent on or live with a parent.

Fritz Hewelt, Minneapolis-based vice president and regional practice leader of Aon Consulting’s benefit plan compliance review services practice, said that “it’s just the administrative and communication and documentation and enrollment issues that follow anytime you have different plan designs.”

Stover said that in one case he encountered last year, an employee alerted his employer that Delaware had enacted such a law, when the firm’s insurer had been unaware of it.

Some clients in New Jersey, whose law took effect in 2006, have also either dropped insured health maintenance organizations from their programs or self-funded the plans if they are large enough, to avoid the state mandates, rather than trying to deal with the administrative complexity, Stover said.

In addition, because of the definition of a dependent under federal law, there may be a disparity between who is considered a dependent under federal law and under state law. This means that if there is any employer contribution, employers must track the value of the coverage as “imputed” taxable income for the employee.

The tax treatment in cases where the child is not considered a dependent under federal law is “another administrative burden for the employer,” because that can change from year to year, said Wendy Bunnell, an attorney with Halleland Lewis Nilan & Johnson in Minneapolis.

“In my mind, the thing we get the most questions on is relative to the tax treatment and the problems that that causes for many multistate [insured companies],” Hewelt said.

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

The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ monthly jobs report showed a marked deceleration in the pace of job cuts in April, as 20,000 jobs were eliminated last month, compared with 81,000 positions cut in March. Unemployment also decreased in April to 5 percent from 5.1 percent in March.

Labor analysts say it could be a signal that the economic slowdown may be less severe than initially expected. An average of 121,000 jobs a month were eliminated in the first four months of the 2001 recession, compared with an average of 65,000 through the first four months this year, according to the BLS.

There were bright spots in the report. Health care jobs grew by 37,000 positions and technical services added 27,000 jobs. There are areas still being pummeled—construction, manufacturing and retail. Since its peak in September 2006, 457,000 jobs have been shed from the construction industry. Meanwhile, 137,000 jobs have been eliminated from the retail sector since March 2007.

Despite the mixed labor news, companies should continue to aggressively recruit.

“The war for talent is still as fierce as ever,” says Manny Avramidis, senior vice president of Global Human Resources for the American Management Association.

He warns companies against lowering their guard because unemployment rates hovering in the 5 percent range are relatively low, meaning qualified talent is still difficult to find.

He says when unemployment crosses into the 6 percent to 7 percent range, companies have a better shot at meeting their recruiting needs because, obviously, the number of workers without a job obviously is higher.

“At that point, it becomes an employer’s market,” he says. “Right now, talent holds the cards.”

—Gina Ruiz

A Washington organization dedicated to strengthening U.S. economic clout is trying to make the issue of improving the skills of American workers a top political priority.

The Council on Competitiveness, a group of leaders from industry, academia and the labor community, called for a national skills agenda that would “ensure a rising standard of living” during a Capitol Hill meeting on Wednesday, April 30. 

The council warned that U.S. productivity is threatened by a combination of a shrinking U.S. workforce and inadequate reading and math skills among those who are in the labor market.

It urged an increased emphasis on “middle” skills—for jobs that don’t require a bachelor’s degree but do call for training beyond high school—and “service economy” skills, such as problem solving, collaboration and teamwork, that enable workers to interact better with customers.

Although the United States needs to produce more scientists and engineers, quantity alone is insufficient, the council said. U.S. technology workers need to have stronger interdisciplinary and entrepreneurial skills.

The recommendations are contained in the council’s report, titled “Thrive: The Skills Imperative.”

Sen. Max Baucus, D-Montana and chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, embraced the report and encouraged the council to provide Congress guidance on the issue.

“Skills are our most sustainable competitive advantage,” Baucus said at the event launching the council report. “They can be our anchor in the turbulent world economy we have.”

Baucus took listeners on a verbal tour of Highway 93, which bisects his state. He mentioned several towns where companies are able to engage in the global economy because of the quality of their machinists, welders and research scientists.

“Montana competes with its workforce,” Baucus said. But he also said that he constantly hears from companies having difficulty attracting and retaining skilled workers.

A major global technology firm has a similar challenge. James Spohrer, director of service research at IBM and a council advisor, says the company can find plenty of engineers and MBAs who are trained to work in manufacturing.

The problem is that IBM has transformed itself from a manufacturing to a business services company. The universities and colleges where it recruits haven’t undergone a similar metamorphosis.

Their science, engineering and management curricula continue to focus about 80 percent on manufacturing and 20 percent on services. In the latter area, students learn about dealing with networks, supply chains, markets and—most important—customers and their quirks.

“The knowledge economy and the service economy are two sides of the same coin,” Spohrer said. “We’re not preparing scientists and engineers for the services economy.”

It’s one thing to bring such concerns to Congress and get a prominent senator to pay attention. Substantial traction, however, requires putting the issue on the presidential campaign agenda, a place where it hasn’t popped up so far.

“Competitiveness, education and investment in research has hardly been addressed at all,” said Norman Augustine, former chairman and CEO of Lockheed Martin and a council advisor. “There is not yet a real broad understanding among the populace of the risks we’re taking if we don’t address” workforce issues.

—Mark Schoeff Jr.

To blog or not to blog? It’s a question marketers are still grappling with years after the first wave of corporate blogging flooded the Web.

For better or worse, it seems corporate blogging—and the title of chief blogger—is beginning to hit its stride. Companies such as Coca-Cola, Marriott and Kodak have recently recruited chief bloggers, with or without the actual title, to tell their stories and engage consumers.

“It’s a good idea to have a chief blogger,” said Mack Collier, a social-media consultant and blogger at the Viral Garden, citing Dell’s Lionel Menchaca and LinkedIn’s Mario Sundar as examples of a personality positively affecting a brand.

At the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas, in March, “[Menchaca and Sundar] were getting hugged in the hallway,” Collier said. “And that popularity is bleeding over into Dell and LinkedIn.”

Today, just more than 11 percent of Fortune 500 companies have corporate blogs, according to SocialText, and only a handful have a designated chief blogger. The number of corporate blogs has risen slowly and steadily since the end of 2005, when just 4 percent had any kind of blog.

“The period of ‘We’ve got to do this too’ has passed, and now people are evaluating blogs as tools,” said Paul Gillin, media consultant and author of The New Influencers. “It’s going mainstream because companies are realizing this is a tool that has utility.” He counts about 60 corporate blogs among the Fortune 500.

While the title of chief blogger is seductive, analysts and industry insiders said the title shouldn’t be the focus. What’s essential is the brand voice, whether it comes from one chief blogger (such as vice chairman Bob Lutz on General Motors’ FastLane Blog or CEO Jonathan Schwartz on Sun Microsystems’ Jonathan’s Blog) or a group working together, such as those on Southwest and Wal-Mart’s blogs.

No one is saying that a chief blogger or blog voice is right for all brands. Bloggers and analysts said companies that want to blog should identify a specific reason to do so, such as to humanize the company (like Microsoft), make the company more open (like Dell) or advance the fun-and-happy company image (like Southwest).

“Everybody right now wants to or is contemplating starting a blog, but it’s the wrong place to start,” said Sean Howard, director of strategy and innovation at Lift Communications and blogger at CrapHammer.com. “They really need to start with reading, following their customers, commenting on communities. Then think about creating something.”

There can be a downside to corporate blogging with a single chief blogger, if that blogger becomes a lightning rod for online communities’ disdain. “The whole idea of having a chief blogger when social media is so grass roots still smacks of companies trying to control this,” said Jim Nail, chief marketing officer of Cymfony.

In fact, Dave Armano, vice president of experience design at Critical Mass and blogger at Logic & Emotion, touched off a minor storm when he posed a simple question for this article: “Any thoughts about the whole ‘chief blogger’ thing?” Most of the responses fell into one of two camps: “No way; it’s too formalized and a bad idea” or “Yes, it’s a dream job I’d love to have.”

Armano—and many others interviewed for this article—were in a third camp, arguing the focus should be less on the chief blogger title and more on how social media can be used to benefit the brand.

“I’m all for the effect that the chief blogger title creates in saying these are full-time jobs, because they are—it’s hard work. I just think it’s the marketing on it that’s off,” Armano said. “It should be a director of community engagement. That takes the focus off the medium and puts it on the interactions.”

Geoff Livingston, CEO of Livingston Communications and blogger at the Buzz Bin, agreed. “The problem is that too many people focus on the actual tool: the blog,” he said. “What they need to focus on is the principles behind social media that make it work—like participating in a larger community works, and not controlling the conversation works.”

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

Wealthy Americans are the primary users of health savings accounts, according to a report from the Government Accountability Office.

Tax filers with HSA activity have higher incomes on average than others, earning about $139,000, compared with $57,000 for other filers.

Enrollment growth in the plans jumped between 2004 and 2007, with participation growing to 4.5 million people, from 438,000.

Additionally, the value of the HSA contributions reported to the IRS in 2005 was $754 million, nearly double the $366 million withdrawn from the accounts.

The GAO’s findings raised criticism from the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman, D-California, and Ways and Means Health Subcommittee Chairman Pete Stark, D-California.

“HSAs clearly are attractive to higher-income people who are looking for tax shelters,” Waxman said in a statement issued by the two congressmen. “But they aren’t the answer for providing adequate health insurance coverage for the average American. This report provides further evidence that we need to re-examine whether this is the right way to use the government’s resources to address our health care needs.”

The accounts, which permit holders to accumulate tax-free savings to pay for medical expenses, are already in question: The House passed a bill in April that would require HSA trustees to substantiate the withdrawals and distributions from these accounts starting December 31, 2010.

HSA advocates fear this would raise the cost of the plans and turn customers off to the accounts.

Filed by Darla Mercado of Investment News, a sister publication of Workforce Management. To comment, e-mail editors@workforce.com.

The first payments required of employers under San Francisco’s controversial health care spending law are due Wednesday, April 30.

That law, which went into effect in January, imposes a health care expenditure requirement on employers.

The law leaves it up to employers to decide how they will make the expenditure, which this year is as much as $1.76 per hour per covered employee.

For example, the expenditure can be for an employer’s group health insurance premium contribution and/or its contribution to employees’ health savings accounts. Employers that do not offer health insurance coverage can satisfy the spending requirement by contributing to a city fund.

In calculating the amount of their health care expenditures on a per-employee basis, employers must include employees who have worked at least 90 days and at least 10 hours a week.

While employers typically spend far more than $1.76 per hour per employee on health care coverage, many employers with workers in San Francisco will be affected nonetheless. For example, few employers provide health care coverage to employees working as little as 10 hours a week.

For those employers who have elected to satisfy the spending mandate by making contributions to the city, payments are made on a quarterly basis. The first payment for employers with 50 or more employees is due April 30, while the first quarterly payment for employers with 20 to 49 employees is due July 30. Employers with fewer than 20 employees are exempt from the law.

While a U.S. District Court judge late last year ruled in a suit filed by a San Francisco-area restaurant association that the spending requirement was pre-empted by the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in January that the law can be implemented while the appeals court decides on the ERISA pre-emption issue.

The appeals court, which on April 17 heard oral arguments on the pre-emption issue, is expected to hand down its ruling within the next couple of months, legal experts say.

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

Whirlpool Corp.’s move to suspend 39 smokers last week for lying on their benefits enrollment forms to avoid a $500 annual tobacco-use surcharge could be seen as part of a growing trend of employers cracking down on employees’ unhealthy habits.

But the Tribune Co.’s announcement just a few days later saying it was dropping its recently instituted $100-a-month smoker penalty indicated that some employers may be getting cold feet.

Benefit experts say these diametrically opposed developments demonstrate the importance of taking corporate culture into consideration before implementing wellness initiatives targeting specific employee behaviors. They also say that employers would be more successful in achieving their wellness goals by taking a positive, rather than punitive, approach.

After news of the suspensions at Whirlpool’s Evansville, Indiana, plant emerged, a spokeswoman for the Benton Harbor, Michigan-based major appliance manufacturer said that the employees were disciplined not because they were caught smoking, but because they had lied about their tobacco use on their benefit plan enrollment forms.

“The company routinely asks employees to confirm their status as a tobacco user or a non-tobacco user as part of the annual benefits enrollment process,” the company said in a statement. “When there appears to be a discrepancy between an individual’s documented status and their behavior, the company investigates. Falsifying company documents is a serious offense. Those found to have done so are subject to disciplinary action, which could include suspension and termination.”

Providing false information when signing up for any insurance plan is considered fraud, according to Alison Earles, an attorney and chief executive of ACE Ideas, an Atlanta-based consulting firm that specializes in wellness incentive programs.

“It’s the same as saying you’re married to your live-in lover in order to get them on your health insurance,” Earles said. “This might be considered an attempt to defraud a health plan … as well as an attempt to defraud the employer.”

While at first some employee benefits experts speculated that Whirlpool’s move may be an indication that employers are becoming more aggressive in administering their wellness programs, they were stunned when the Chicago-based Tribune Co. announced it was ending its tobacco surcharge program just four months after it began.

In January, the publishing company began charging employees who smoked an additional $100 per month in premium for their health benefits. The fee was also assessed on those employees whose dependents were tobacco users.

However, the company decided to drop the fee instituted by the previous administration. Financier Sam Zell became chairman and chief executive in a private takeover last year.

The tobacco surcharge was “inconsistent with the new culture,” reported the Chicago Tribune, which is owned by the Tribune Co.

“We’d rather you use your own judgment when it comes to tobacco use, not impose ours upon you,” Gerry Spector, executive vice president and chief administrative officer, said in an e-mail to employees, according to the report.

About 600 of the company’s 16,000 employees had been assessed the fee, which will be refunded to them in May. The company also said it will continue to offer a free smoking cessation program.

“I find it odd that an employer would back off an initiative that clearly has tremendous long-term beneficial impact, first for employees’ lives and second for impacting health costs,” said Ray Brusca, vice president of benefits at Black & Decker Corp. in Towson, Maryland. “It flies in the face of employee engagement.”

Black & Decker started a $25 monthly tobacco-use surcharge in 2007.

The opposing developments “show the conflict employers face in trying to motivate employees to become more engaged in their own health, without looking like they intend to interfere with personal lifestyle decisions,” said Larry Boress, president and CEO of the Midwest Business Group on Health, a Chicago-based employer coalition.

Taken together, “these two extremes—disciplining workers over a stop-smoking incentive and discontinuing a stop-smoking incentive—are indicative of the troubles employers are having while grappling with efforts to manage health care costs,” said Bob Queyrouze, internal consultant-compensation/benefits/health and productivity management at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.

“Some companies are considering more aggressive actions, such as not hiring smokers or putting restrictions on smoking, but they’re essentially experimenting,” said Tom Lerche, health care practice leader at Aon Consulting in Chicago. “They’re trying to figure out how aggressive they can be but, at the same time, respect the employee.”

Others companies, however, appear to be backing off, said Jim Winkler, national health care practice leader at Hewitt Associates in Norwalk, Connecticut. A recent Hewitt survey that found only 19 percent of employers said that employees who aren’t taking care of their health should pay more, down from 27 percent two years ago.

Winkler said much of the success of implementing wellness initiatives depends on how they are pitched to employees.

“If you market an incentive or a discount as a positive for people, it is much more broadly accepted,” he said. Unfortunately, both Whirlpool and the Tribune “positioned it as a surcharge.”

In the case of Tribune, “if they had put the same mechanism in place but marketed it as a discount for nonsmokers, they would have had a firestorm of people objecting about having it taken away,” he said.

And if Whirlpool had used that approach, the company may have had better compliance without having to resort to disciplinary action, Winkler suggested.

Andrew Webber, president of the National Business Coalition on Health, an association of employer groups based in Washington, also believes employers should use “carrots rather than sticks” to build employee trust. “Employers also need to clearly communicate expectations around employee lifestyle choices and give employees time and support mechanisms to modify behaviors before negative economic incentives are used,” he said.

Employers that carefully examine their organization’s culture and workforce, clearly communicate their objectives and take the time to determine whether there might be any unintended consequences or backlash “find their programs are accepted, understood and successful,” Boress said.

Ultimately, “every company has to figure out from a cultural point of view how to administer these plans,” including how they will enforce them, Lerche said.

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

The Supreme Court will decide whether a benefit plan administrator that both determines and pays benefits operates under a conflict of interest that must be considered by courts reviewing benefits cases.

The high court heard arguments Wednesday, April 23, in a case that raises the question about plans governed by the Employee Retirement Income Security Act. The case—Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. et al vs. Wanda Glenn—involves a former Sears, Roebuck & Co. employee who suffers from a severe heart condition.

Glenn received benefits for “total disability” from MetLife, which administers and insures the Sears-sponsored plan. After Glenn’s condition began to improve, MetLife rescinded the benefits, holding that Glenn could perform low-stress work.

Glenn sued, and a U.S. district court ruled for MetLife. Glenn appealed, and a three-judge panel of the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on September 1, 2006, that MetLife’s dual role in both determining and paying benefits represented a conflict of interest, and that its decision to stop the benefits was “arbitrary and capricious.” MetLife appealed to the Supreme Court.

The federal government weighed in on Glenn’s side in a brief filed with the high court before Wednesday’s arguments.

“An ERISA plan administrator that both makes benefits determinations and pays benefits out of its own funds, such as MetLife, is operating under a conflict of interest, because it benefits financially if it denies an employee’s claim,” wrote the U.S. solicitor general in the brief. “A court reviewing a benefit determination by a dual-role administrator should consider the administrator’s conflict of interest, even in the absence of evidence indicating that the administrator was motivated by its financial self-interest.”

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