I put this in GD, 'cause I figure it’ll either end up here or in the Pit.
Lately, whenever the subject of minimum wage or healthcare comes up, there’s a fairly predictable inrush of people who claim that employers (especially those who pay at or near minimum wage) are now starting to cap hours at 29/week so they can avoid the penalties of “Obamacare”. In other words, the ACA is now effectively punishing minimum wage employees.
Hold on a sec. I was at or near minimum wage until I was about twenty-five or so. I never had the option of working full-time. I always had to work two jobs to get to 40 hours/week.
Even my first “real” job, where I ran a university computer lab, would only schedule me 35/week, because any more than that and I’d be considered a full-time employee and be eligible for benefits.
Does the minimum-wage, full-time mythical beast exist? And is the ACA making them even more rare?
I’m sure it does, somewhere. And I’m sure it is, a bit. Anything that raises the costs of benefits is going to result in employers attempting to reduce the number of workers that collect those benefits.
Many benefits (health care being among them) cost proportionally more as a percentage of salary costs for those workers whose salary costs are lower. So if you can reduce the number of lower salaried workers for whom you have to pay benefits, you’re going to do it.
The only way to eliminate this issue would be to mandate benefits for part-time workers. Good luck with that.
I think this is a big deal for restaurants. They pay at or below MW for employees who receive tips. There are a lot of waiters and waitresses out there, and surely some of them work 40 hrs/wk.
I’ve had several full time minimum wage jobs over the years. My current employer, dial america, has stopped hiring anyone full time, and current full time employees are getting dropped to part time if they have to switch programs.
My wife works full time. She does not get health insurance. The only people in the company that DO get health insurance are the owners and a few employees who got grandfathered in when they stopped offering health insurance seven or eight years ago. The rest of the employees can fucking die, as far as the owners are concerned. Everything employers say about Obamacare is just cover for their basic lack of empathy.
Look in rural America. Jobs are usually low paying. The employers mostly have too employees to be subject to Obamacare limits (having 50 employees is a big business in a small town).
The reason so many minimum wage jobs are part time is to reduce the impact of no-shows. Employers fully expect that minimum wage workers don’t have a lot of company loyalty or a strong work ethic, so there’s a not insignificant chance an employee won’t show up for their shift. And it’s a lot easier to manage without a person for 4-5 hours than for a full 8-hour shift.
The harm this does to the community and their employees overall is just an unfortunate side effect.
If this chart is to be believed, there are 316k people working full time at minimum wage, and another 427k below minimum wage. However, the latter likely make more as they are usually tipped employees.
Don’t you believe it. The reason is now and ever has been to avoid paying benefits, whether insurance or days off with pay or whatever. When I worked for Sears nearly forty years ago no one was full time except management (who weren’t hourly). Same at the school district where I worked more recently. We were very careful to keep all the hourly staff under the cutoff point for benefits.
I keep hearing people say that- but forty years ago Sears didn’t have to provide benefits to anyone except by their own policy, which the company was free to change. The fast food restaurants I worked in 30 years ago didn’t provide benefits to anyone , including managers. Still, almost nobody worked 40 hours. It had nothing to do with benefits, and only indirectly had to do with no shows. It mostly has to do with overtime. If I’m already working 40 hours, then every extra minute I work is time and a half. Managers have to be careful about who they call in to cover a shift/ask to stay late when someone calls in sick/no shows/the store is unexpectedly busy. If no one is ever scheduled for more than 29 or 30 hours, it’s a lot easier to avoid overtime pay
My son currently has a part-time retail job where he gets PTO and is eligible for insurance and a 401K where the company matches dollar for dollar. And still, no one works 40 hours a week. It’s not about the benefits.
All three of my primary jobs I’ve held in my life started as full-time minimum wage jobs. The first offered no benefits except for management, the second and third full benefits for full-time. I’m grandfathered in at my current job, considered full-time for anything above 28 hours a week. This current job changed the rules before Obama was president, both requiring newer hires to work > 32 hours a week to be full-time, and putting a freeze on hiring full-time employees. (Employees can transition into full-time status at the store’s discretion, which usually extends to more difficult jobs, or if a part-timer is scheduled full-time hours on average for a given period of time). A lot of the current crop of employees are blaming Obamacare for their plight, but as said, this place’s policies predate Obama. I’m sure the penny pinchers at the top are delighted that the blame has conveniently been shifted off of them.
In 1986 I had a fast food job that offered benefits even for part-timers. I had no idea how to evaluate how good the package was, being in high school and still covered on my parents plan, but it was available for something like $25 a week. Most of my coworkers were in school too, so none of us wanted full time but there were a couple of older workers on day shift that were full time.
From 91-94 I worked in a pharmacy chain. Started at minimum wage and was regularly scheduled 35-38 hours weekly from the beginning. At 90 days we were eligible for benefits and got a ten cent raise, with yearly merit reviews after that. They totally cared about time-and-a-half pay for anyone clocking more than forty hours and they’d bend over backwards to avoid it, so most of us were scheduled a 36 hour week and sometimes you’d stay over an hour or two to help out as needed.
I worked retail and restaurant jobs throughout my teens and much longer that offered 40+ hours. I knew several people who worked multiple FULL-time jobs, at least seasonally. While many of these jobs paid marginally better than minimum, most of them started there.
$25 a week on 1986’s minimum wage ($3.35 an hour) was a small fortune, and still is for some people. And I bet it was one of those bogus insurance plans that caps out at, say, $5,000. Not a $5,000 deductible; it only PAID $5,000. :rolleyes:
