In response to public disapproval from employees, College officials will partially reverse their previous decision to terminate employee death benefits, Provost Carol Folt announced last Wednesday. The original decision, which was met with a strong backlash from retirees and current staff, was part of the two-year effort to close the College's $100-million budget shortfall.
The death benefit policy will be reinstated for all current retirees, as well as any employees who retire before Dec. 31, 2010. After that date, the College will no longer offer death benefits to employees, Folt and Executive Vice President Steven Kadish wrote in an e-mail to the College staff.
Death benefits were originally eliminated as part of the College's strategic budget reduction initiative, after the Service Employees International Union Local 560 signed a new two-year contract with the College in August that reduced health care benefits and made other changes to the College's budget structure.
Following the decision, many retirees spoke out against the change, particularly in the pages of the Valley News, whose editorial board also wrote a piece against the benefit's elimination.
The death benefit provides $5,000 in cash to the family of a retiree upon death, College President Jim Yong Kim said in an interview with The Dartmouth following the original decision. Elimination of the death benefit would save the College between $150,000 and $200,000 annually, according to Folt and Kadish's e-mail.
SEIU Local 560 President Earl Sweet has filed a grievance with the College on behalf of current union employees not planning on retiring before Dec. 31, who will forfeit their chance for receiving the death benefit, Sweet said in an interview with The Dartmouth.
College staff had planned to hold a protest on Monday to lobby against the benefit's elimination, although the protest was cancelled once the benefit was reinstated for retirees, Sweet said.
"We may be out there protesting if this isn't settled," Sweet said. "I don't know when, but the likelihood is very good if the College doesn't give back [the death benefit]. We are certainly going to react to it."
The focus is now on restoring the death benefit to all College employees, considering the "untruthful" nature of its elimination, Sweet said.
"We have a contract with the College, and they've made this decision afterwards," Sweet said. "Everything they're doing lately such as cutting benefits to employees is going to cost employees up to thousands of dollars a year."
Sweet identified employees with children or a College employee with a spouse that has medical problems as examples of those who will suffer from the College's recent cuts in health benefits.
In the e-mail, Kadish and Folt wrote that they had felt it was preferable to eliminate the benefit in favor of retaining other benefits, such as the Dartmouth College Medicare Supplement health insurance premium.
The College Benefits Council reviewed benefit packages offered by businesses and the College's peer institutions and found that none provided death benefits, Kim said.
"We are very troubled by how the College is acting towards its employees," Sweet said. "It has a business mentality that is run by numbers, but these numbers are people."
Kim had previously said that while he understood the difficulty eliminating the benefit would cause, he felt it was a sound policy decision.
