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This site will recognize businesses and organizations in six northeast Georgia counties that are Worker Friendly. |
6. How are points assigned? Wages. The upper end of the “wage” scale is anchored by what we call the “American Dream” wage. This wage ($20.50) is defined as the hourly wage which would permit the “average” worker to own the median-price home in Athens-Clarke County while paying no more than 30% of their gross income for housing-related costs (mortgage, interest, taxes, insurance, and utilities). Click here for calculations. We chose the 30% criteria based on HUD guidelines for homeowners (see calculators). At the lower end, we decided to begin with $7.50 per hour. We believe this figure is already used by a substantial number of businesses, so would be a realistic lower end. The scale was then subdivided into $2.50 increments. Businesses earn more points as they move up the wage scale. We solved the dilemma of how to derive an “average” for the upper “American Dream” wage by looking at Census 2000 figures of the number of households with workers between 18 and 65 years of age in Athens-Clarke County, Georgia. We derived separate “American Dream” wages for single-earner households and 2-earner households, assuming in both cases that all workers in the home worked full time (defined as 2,080 hours per year). We then averaged these wages, taking into account the proportion of single earner and two-earner households in Athens-Clarke County Click here for calculations. Benefits. Wages alone are not sufficient to achieve the American Dream. At a minimum, employees must also have: 1) access to affordable health insurance, 2) sufficient holidays, vacation, and sick leave (to balance work and family demands and to promote psychological well-being); and 3) a savings plan for retirement. Therefore employers also receive points for these benefits. There are many other benefits businesses could provide. But we did not feel we could easily quantify the value of other benefits, such as access to continuing education. We also had no way to observe workplace quality characteristics, such as safety, supervisor support, or the physical conditions of the workplace. We therefore decided to focus only on the above benefits. We recognize that this is an imperfect system. We could conceivably recognize a business or organization that provides high wages and substantial benefits, but has a terrible workplace environment. In the end, however, we felt that our basic goal was to identify businesses that provided a supportive wage and benefit package. We will leave the monitoring of workplace climate to consumers themselves. If you visit a business listed on this website several times and have concerns about the workplace environment—simply stop giving them your business! How did you define “employees?” We spent a great deal of time on this issue. Issues that we considered were: 1) Should we include youth under 18 years and college students? 2) Should we focus on full time, regular employees or also consider part-time and temporary employees? 3) How do we adapt the criteria for businesses of different sizes. More details are given in the calculations sections. Simply put, we decided to:
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