Active employee Open Enrollment is now live for 2025 until October 21. If you are needing to make any changes for next year, now is the time to do so. If you do nothing, your benefits will stay the same as they are now, with the exception that Flex Spending and Dependant Care Spending must be elected each year. To make your elections, you will need to log in to Workday in My Bridgestone. The Open Enrollment event should be listed as a task.

Here are a couple of reminders or things that seem to come up each year.

• Ensure that you have submitted your elections. This is an issue that we see one or two of every year, especially with flex spending. We've had members who thought they had completed the enrollment, only to find out once the year has started that something had gone wrong. Ensure you are reviewing and actually submitting the changes as the last step of the process. There is a confirmation document that you can download and save to refer back to if there are issues later.

• Be careful not to enroll in Dependent Care Spending instead of Flex Spending. We seem to have at least one of these each year as well. These are two completely different benefits. Flex spending is a pre-tax account that can be used for out of pocket health-related expenses, such as deductibles, coinsurance, copays and prescriptions. Dependent care spending is a pre-tax account that can be used for childcare expenses.
• If you are adding dependents, ensure that you also submit any required documents along with those, such as birth or marriage certificates.

If the open enrollment window is missed or a mistake made, it can be very difficult, if not impossible to correct after the fact, due to strict regulations regarding health care.

If you need assistance, you can contact me at the Union Hall and I will do my best to help you.

Emily Brannon- P&I Rep