Employee Transfers Slowing

Until a few years ago, national corporations treated their executive, technical and professional people as if they were in the military.

Every two to three years, they transferred them. It was part of the process for the upwardly mobile organization person.

That’s not as true today, for three reasons.

First, with the flattening of U.S. corporations, there are not as many people to transfer. Increasingly, corporations are using computers to collect and transmit information instead of relying on middle managers to do that job. At the bottom of the corporation, self-directed teams are assuming many management functions.

Employee resistance to transfer is the second reason. Employees see that transfers can cause wrenching family problems. Chief among them is the growth of the two-career family. While a transfer might represent one person’s promotion it can mean the derailing - temporarily or permanently - of the spouse’s.

The third barrier to transfer is cost.

The Employee Relocation Council, an industry-supported, Washington-based organization, tracks the cost of corporate transfers each year.

In 1996, it reported that the average cost of relocating a homeowning employee - and 50 percent of them owned homes - was $45,373.

Transferring an employee who rented was a relative bargain at $12,962.

The difference was the cost of disposing of the employee’s home after the move.

Only 3 percent of the companies did not provide some sort of assistance in selling the transferring employee’s home and helping him or her buy a new one.

Generally, companies worked with real estate agents to sell the home.

They often paid the agent’s commission on the sale. About 15 percent of companies simply bought the employee’s home and resold it. Almost all the companies had some sort of program to see that the employee didn’t wind up taking a bath on the sale of a home.

But those transferring can still suffer severe financial pressure from a move. That’s because the cost of living varies greatly across the country.

Houston, for example, enjoys the lowest cost of living of the top 25 metropolitan areas in the country with a cost of living index of 93.8.

The biggest factor in Houston’s lower cost of living is housing costs.

Those moving from Houston can suffer a nasty shock when setting up housekeeping in another metropolitan area.

All employees facing transfers should take a close look at what they will earn after the move and how far that paycheck will go - compared to where they live now.

Fortunately, in this age of automation and the Internet, that’s relatively easy to do.

There’s a neat little Web site called the salary calculator. You can find it at http://www.homefair.com/homefair/cmr/salcalc.html. It’s simple to operate.

Say your company wants to move you from Houston to the home office in New York City. You find Texas and New York, then click on cities.

Put your salary in the slot, and click on Houston and New York City - or in this case Manhattan. The calculator tells you that if you made $100,000 a year in Houston, you would need to make $278,407 to maintain the same standard of living in Manhattan.

Living on Long Island and making that long commute each day would mean you needed a $41,222-a-year raise. Staten Island is a veritable bargain.

It would take only $137,879 to maintain your current living standard, and you get to take that nice ferry ride to company headquarters in Manhattan.

Those figures don’t include state taxes. But included elsewhere is a state tax table. It tells us that our mythical $100,000 person would pay as much as $7,010 - depending upon his deductions - in state income taxes. Texas has no state income tax.

Of course, if you were asked to transfer to Houston from Manhattan, you might jump at the chance - if money was your prime motive.

Some feel they have no choice about transferring. Turning down a transfer, they believe, would hurt their future promotion chances.

But remember, the national unemployment rate is under 5 percent. The young, the old and the unskilled have the worst problem finding a job.

The job market for potential transferees - depending on their age and skills - is prime.