Dive Brief:
- Retail and food service business rank at the bottom when it comes to providing benefits, according to a new study by Glassdoor.
- Both industries, already known for their mostly low-paying jobs, such as store clerks, servers and dishwashers, offer minimum wage or just above. For many workers, their actual incomes depend on customer tips.
- Moving to the industries with the best benefits (Glassdoor ranked 8 altogether), the highest-rated overall benefits on a rating scale of 1-5 are in finance (3.72), information technology or IT (3.68), and manufacturing (3.64).
Dive Insight:
Not only do those two sectors pay low, many of the jobs don't come with any benefits at all. And Glassdoor also found that the workers who do receive benefits (healthcare, for example) in those industries rate company-paid plans as not very good.
"Employers in these fields don't offer much in the way of benefits, but what we had never studied before was the quality of benefits for those who were offered them," Glassdoor chief economist Andrew Chamberlain told CBS News. "Even for the retail and restaurant workers who are lucky enough to get benefits, they reviewed them very poorly, so it's a double whammy."
Following the top three and the bottom two, other sectors in among the eight ranked were education (3.61), healthcare (3.44) and business services (3.37). Retail scored 3.11 and restaurants, bars and food services tallied a 2.73 rating in the Glassdoor study.
