Free Republic

Headline only.

The Walt Disney Company got some nice press around the Web today following the disclosure that it would promote more than 400 part-time employees to full-time status,a move that was attributed to new requirements under the U.S. federal Affordable Care Act (also known as the "Obamacare" law).... But changes in health care laws don't drive employers' decisions about adding or cutting hours nearly as much as one other factor does —how much money the company's making. If there's money on the table to be had, companies will add the workers and hours they need to collect it. If there's no...

As the long-awaited debut of so-called Obamacare approaches, it should come as no surprise that the single largest piece of legislation ever written - that directly impacts one-sixth of the U.S. economy - is giving rise to lots and lots of unexpected outcomes, both positive and negative. - SNIP - ''We're trying to go to full time employment. We'd love to have people on 40 hours a week but the government is going in just the opposite direction," Funk says, noting that lower-waged hourly workers are particularly likely to see their shifts cut from 40 to 29 or 30 hours...

Local governments across the country are facing the dilemma of cutting part-time employees' work hours to below 30 hours a week to avoid paying the increasing cost of health care under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Even though the Obama administration has postponed, until January 2015, the employer mandate that requires all companies, school districts and municipalities to provide health care for employees who work 30 hours a week or more, or face a penalty of $2,000 to $3,000 per worker, many have decided to reduce their employees' work hours this year. In Middletown, N.J., for instance, Township Administrator Anthony...

<p>It’s been quite a week for ObamaCare, and we’re not even to the end of it yet. First we find out that the White House missed half of the statutory deadlines in the bill and still has almost half of them left unaccomplished. Next, UPS canceled spousal coverage because of the ACA, which will save it $60 million in costs, and CNBC described how employees might start petitioning their bosses to drop health insurance in order to score taxpayer-funded subsidies. The AFL-CIO in Nevada finally discovered what a bad deal they’re getting, and Gallup confirmed that the more people know about ObamaCare, the less they like it.</p>

Barack Obama wanted to fundamentally change America. He is. The Obamacare law is already destroying full-time jobs in America. Democrats rammed through a law that will destroy at least 2 percent of all full-time jobs in America. We are already seeing jobs disappear. Even Reuters can’t hide the truth any longer: U.S. businesses are hiring at a robust rate. The only problem is that three out of four of the nearly 1 million hires this year are part-time and many of the jobs are low-paid. Faltering economic growth at home and abroad and concern that President Barack Obama’s signature health...

While liberals were busy bemoaning the low wages of the minimally skilled hamburger flippers and other fast food employees, while Congress and the unions were busy exempting themselves from the Obamacare they pushed for,, another group of workers was falling victim to the Unaffordable Health Care Act. Shop girls. Sales clerks. Forever 21, the privately held fast fashion retailer teen aged girls just lo-o-ove, recently informed many full time employees that beginning Sunday, August 18 they were suddenly part time employees; their maximum working hours dropping to 29.5 hours a week. Obamacare's mandatory employer provided health insurance kicks in for...

Hit by years of budget cuts, some U.S. public school boards are looking to avoid providing health benefits to substitute teachers and supporting staff under President Barack Obama's reform law, education officials say. According to the law, employers will have to offer health coverage to all full-time employees, defined as those who work an average of 30 or more hours per week each month, or else pay a fine starting in 2015. In Indiana's Fort Wayne Community Schools district, one of the state's largest, administrators reduced hours for 610 of its 4,050 employees, including substitute teachers and support staff, who...

Source: Thinkstock As the nation continues to recover from the recession, not only is the unemployment rate down, but the underemployment rate — an important measure of the health of the job market — has been slowly declining as well.In 2012, 14.7% of all people in the workforce either had no job, were too discouraged to go looking, or were not working as much as they wanted. Through the 12 months ending mid-2013, this figure had fallen slightly to 14.3%. But in many states, underemployment remains persistently high. These are the states where it is hardest to find full-time work.Click...

Keeping in mind that, under ObamaCare, a “full-time” work week is only 30 hours, the SBA website provides an example: Company X has 40 full-time employees working 40 hours per week, along with 20 part-time employees working 15 hours per week. The 20 part-time employees are counted as 10 full-time equivalent employees. Company X has 50 full-time employees and is subject to the employer shared responsibility provisions. The rules are a “problem for employers at the margin” of 50 full-time workers, said Edmund F. Haisimaier of the Heritage Foundation. In addition, the mandates include seasonal employees, so even if a...

Being on vacation last week meant that I missed the jobs report for July, which turned out to be as unremarkable as most of those in the four-plus years of the so-called economic recovery. The media reports I did catch while on the cruise focused mainly on the fact that the jobs added in July missed the expectations of analysts, and not on the fact that adding only 162,000 jobs meant another extension of stagnation, as the US economy needs ~150,000 jobs added each month just to tread water, thanks to population growth. That’s not even a decent maintenance number,...

For Kevin Pace, the president’s health-care law could have meant better health insurance. Instead, it produced a pay cut. Like many of his colleagues, the adjunct music professor at Northern Virginia Community College had managed to assemble a hefty course load despite his official status as a part-time employee. But his employer, the state, slashed his hours this spring to avoid a Jan. 1 requirement that all full-time workers for large employers be offered health insurance. The law defines “full time” as 30 hours a week or more. “We work so hard for so little pay,” he said. “You would...

As I mentioned last week, even that most excellent of all grocery stores, Wegmans — much like many other businesses — is adjusting to the new costs of doing business directly imposed on them by ObamaCare, and is now preparing to nix their longtime practice of voluntarily offering health insurance options to part-time employees who work even just 20+ hours/week. In that same vein, the “Affordable” Care Act has made hiring part-time employees (i.e., those who work less than the 30 hours over which employers will be required to provide health insurance) over full-time employees an increasingly attractive option for...

Delaying the Obamacare employer mandate has simply put off rules business had already started adjusting to. Under the Affordable Care Act, companies with 50-plus full-time employees must start offering them health insurance or face stiff penalties. The employer mandate had been set to kick in January 2014, but was pushed back a year. Because a 30-hour work week counts as full-time under Obamacare, Fatburger fast-food restaurants had started cutting worker hours below that threshold, CEO Andy Wiederhorn said. Some Fatburger owners even began "job sharing" with other businesses, teaming up to share a higher number of employees all working fewer...

IBD Editorials America's Job Recovery Is Only For Part-Timers Posted 07/05/2013 06:09 PM ET Employment: From the media to Wall Street, June's jobs report is being spun as a major positive, a sign the economy is getting back on track. Maybe the pundits should look at the actual numbers, which are abysmal. aclbfTo hear some of them, the 195,000 payroll jobs added for the month while the unemployment rate stayed at 7.6% were a big deal. One investment house called it a "very good report." Another termed it "solid." Really? Let's take a little closer look at the numbers. The...

The Rise in Part Time Employment since the Great Recession- By: Larry Walker, Jr. -There are five categories among all nonagricultural workers who are officially counted as employed: government workers, private household and private industry workers, the self-employed and unpaid family workers. Among them there are three additional status classifications: those employed part time for economic reasons, part time for noneconomic reasons, and those employed full-time. An analysis of recent trends reveals that the number of part time workers is on the increase, while the number of full-time workers is on the decline.Before we begin, the aforementioned status classifications...

The costs of Obamacare are not just hitting businesses this year--they are also hitting the government, and public employees as well. Virginia, for example, is about to limit part-time employees to 29 hours per week in order to avoid triggering Obamacare’s requirement that employers provide health insurance to those working 30 hours per week or more. The state cannot afford the $110 million annual cost of insurance. Elsewhere, public institutions are taking similar steps to limit part-time work. In Ohio, Youngstown State University recently announced a 29-hour-per-week part-time limit, and placed employees on notice that they would be fired if...

There are already 8 million Americans working part time who want to work full time. It seems likely that number will skyrocket once Obamacare is implemented. An Obamacare supporter is as stupid as the Democrats who passed the legislation in the first place: ******** When my better half told me that her boss was thinking about cutting all full-time employees to part time in order to avoid the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act insurance requirements (for full-time employees), my initial response was, "Surely the federal government wouldn't have allowed such a blatantly obvious way of getting out of the...

If you are looking for a full-time job, prepare to be disappointed if President Obama wins re-election Tuesday. Since Obama was sworn into office in 2009, the number of Americans with full-time jobs has actually fallen by 370,000. The number of Americans with part-time jobs, by contrast, is up 1.5 million. Jobs are being created in the Obama economy, but they're not the type of jobs Americans can live on. And Obama's policies are clearly contributing to the shift. Last month, we noted that Darden Restaurants, the parent company of popular chains like Olive Garden and Red Lobster, stopped replacing...

Obamacare is a monumental house of horrors. Open a door and find another monster. Robert Samuelson opens the door on the law’s distinction between full-time and part-time workers. You think Obamacare might have something to do with suppressing the growth of full-time employment? Consider Samuelson’s observations.