Employer contributions deducted from quoted salary—is this normal? In order to help in future salary negociation, I wanted to know whether it is condiered normal in North America to be quoted a gross salary that does not take into account employer contributions to things such as a a mandatory pension plan.

Specific example situation

This question is based on a situation I am experiencing right now, so I will use this to illustrate more specifically what I mean. I have just accepted a postdoc position (in a Canadian university, in case this is relevant), for which my advisor offered a salary of $40,000.

He wanted me to start working very quickly and I was available, so I started working without having signed my contract. Two weeks after, he explained that the work contrat was ready, and that the amount I would see in it (ca. $36,000) was the $40,000 he had quoted minus the contributions towards the pension plan and group insurance.

It was not obvious to me whether the deducted contributions were my contributions, i.e. $36,000 minus withheld tax would be my net income, or whether he had deducted the employer contributions and my net income would therefore be $36,000 minus my own contributions minus withheld tax.

I sent an email asking just that, and my advisor came to my office, slightly on the defensive I thought, to explain that the grant he had for my salary covered only $40,000 per year in total but that he had decided he would pay for the employer deductions with money from a different grant, and therefore that a new contract would be drafted.

And here I am, wondering whether there was an honest mistake or misunderstanding, whether I'm being a diva and my advisor just doesn't want to deal with it, or whether someone has tried to screw me.

Your answers will help me address this concern but mostly, as I wrote, will be helpful to me and I suspect to others in knowing exactly how to negociate their salary in the future.

Disclaimer

And before anyone tells me, I do realise that I am getting an adequate salary in the current conditions and that I should consider myself lucky to have a pension plan and group insurance.
To deduct employer contributions from the salary as well as employee contributions would be highly unusual, I believe. (If it were the norm, then there would be no need for a terminological distinction between employer and employee contributions.)

EDIT: Here is my guess about what happened (purely speculation).  Perhaps there are contributions that are classified as "employer contributions" for tax purposes, and the university requires these contributions to be made for postdocs as well as regular employees but only makes the contributions for regular employees, so for postdocs the money has to come out of a grant instead.  This situation has the potential to be confusing, so perhaps your advisor simply forgot about this until you reminded him, at which point he realized that he made a mistake.

In any case, the question you asked him in your e-mail was completely reasonable.