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U.S. workers' access to employee benefits may have stayed about the same between March 2018 and March 2019, even as the overall U.S. civilian unemployment rate fell to 3.8 percent, from 4 percent.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) — an arm of the U.S. Department of Labor — has published data supporting that conclusion in a collection of results from the bureau's March civilian employer survey.
The percentage of U.S. civilian workers who had access to medical benefits seemed to edge lower, to 71 percent, from 72 percent, according to the BLS data. But the margin of error for that figure is 0.7 percent, meaning that the apparent 1-percentage drop in access could be mostly the result of a rounding error.
Here's what happened to access to some other types of benefits:
- Life insurance: The percentage of U.S. civilian workers said to have access to life insurance benefits held steady at 60 percent.
- Short-term disability insurance: Access increased to 40 percent, from 39 percent. (The margin of error was 0.8 percent.)
- Long-term disability insurance: Access held steady at 34 percent.
The new BLS survey report suggests that the benefits market may have been stronger in the West than in the South.
The percentage of workers in the West who had access to life insurance benefits, for example, increased to 60 percent in March, from 57 percent a year earlier.
The percentage of workers in the region that includes Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas who had access to life benefits fell to 59 percent, from 62 percent, and the percentage who actually got covered fell to 55 percent, from 60 percent.
|Resources
Links to the new BLS benefits survey report and older benefits survey reports are available here.
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Allison Bell
Allison Bell, a senior reporter at ThinkAdvisor and BenefitsPRO, previously was an associate editor at National Underwriter Life & Health. She has a bachelor's degree in economics from Washington University in St. Louis and a master's degree in journalism from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. She can be reached through X at @Think_Allison.
