Wage debates are always heated, no matter if it is an employee asking their boss for a rise, or union negotiations. Anyway, in the past year or two, the wage question became one of the leading topics of public debate in Slovakia.
Thanks to political involvement, many Slovak started to believe that Slovak employers are of an especially vile kind, that they ignore economic reality and hold wages as low as possible.
Unfortunately, most citizens do not see behind the veil of wage, tax, and social insurance contributions. Behind this veil, there is a huge land of additional costs and difficulties an employer has to face.
Therefore, INESS decided to shed some light on this realm and created a new portal: cenazamestnanca.sk (Cost of an employee).
Its core consist of an employee cost calculator. Unlike many wage calulators available online, which only count net disposable income, taxes, and contributions, this calculator offers two unique features.
First, it takes 15 inputs from a user and counts all monetary expenses an employer has. Not only wage, taxes, and contributions, but also overtime, night-time, or weekend bonuses required by law, contributions on food vouchers or leisure vouchers, 13th and 14th wage, and all kinds of benefits.
Second, it calculates the cost per time spent working. This means it discounts paid vacation, paid doctor visits, and other time expenses.
For example, a 35-year old industrial employee, working on shifts with a EUR 800 contract gross salary and a number of bonuses receives on average EUR 791 in cash per month.
However, such an employee costs the employer EUR 1656 per 174 hours worked. The difference between net cash and total costs is 105%.
INESS intends to regularly update the calculator, so that every new regulation increasing or decreasing employment cost can be immediately put into numbers.
In a long term, we also hope to find international partners for this project and add also other countries, enabling users to easily compare the prices of the same employee in various countries.
