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Chapter 15 Reflection

My parents have always encouraged me to pursue education, and especially a college degree because it would enable me to get a job that pays a livable wage with health insurance benefits. When I graduated in 2011 there were new policies mandating employer-paid health insurance plans for companies with full-time workers. It sounds great, but in reality it incentivized employers to restructure in order to avoid this costly plan. The only jobs I could find were part-time!!! Ironically, I was under-employed even though I had taken the supposedly tried-and-true route of getting a college degree.

Human resource regulations such as age-based policies can affect the cost of hiring workers if such regulations increase the time and efforts required to obtain eligible employees. Also, older employees generally have more work experience and more skills, which impacts the wage they will demand. Younger workers, such as high-schoolers, can work more cheaply. However, in some safety-related cases, younger inexperienced workers may be more prone to accidents which will affect the company's cost of worker's compensation and accident insurance. In order to reduce the risk, increasing spending on training can be beneficial. So there is always a trade off, and it can be difficult to say exactly how a certain policy will affect a company's bottom line.

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