Posted on 11/29/2012 5:44:14 AM PST by 1rudeboy
Sorry, but it is not the fiscal cliff. It is the complete shift in the US labor model, at least in the service sector, due to Obamacare.
Here is what I am doing for the rest of the year -- working with every manager in my company so that as of January 1, 2013, none of our employees are working more than 28 hours a week. I think most readers know the reason -- we have got to get our company under 50 full time employees or else I am facing a bill from Obamacare in 2014 that will be several times larger than my annual profit. I love my workers. They make me a success. But most of my competitors are small businesses that are exempt from the Obamacare hammer. To compete, I must make sure my company is exempt as well. This means that our 400+ full time employees will have to be less than 50 in 2013, so that when the Feds look at me at the start of 2014, I am exempt. We will have more employees working fewer hours, with more training costs, but the Obamacare bill looks like about $800,000 a year for us, at least, and I am pretty sure the cost of more training will be less than that.
This will be unpopular but tolerable to most of my employees. The vast majority of them are retired and our company is merely an excuse to stay busy, work outdoors, and get a little extra money.
But this is going to be an ENORMOUS change in the rest of the service sector. I have talked to a lot of owners of restaurants and restaurant chains, and the 40-hour work week is a thing of the past in that business. One of my employees said that in Hawaii, it was all the hotel employees could talk about. Many chains are working on mutli-team systems where two teams of people working part-time replace the former group of full-time employees. 2013 is going to see a lot of people (who are not paid very well to begin with) getting their hours and pay cut by 25%. At the same time that they are required, likely for the first time since many are relatively young, to purchase health insurance.
It will be interesting to see what solutions emerge. My bet is that it will become standard for people in the service sector to work two different jobs for 20-25 hours each with two different companies. This will be a pain for them, but allow them to keep their income up. The hard part may be coordinating shifts between companies. For example, a company that divides their shifts into mon-tue-wed vs. thu-fri-sat cannot share employees with one who divides their shifts between morning and afternoon. If given time, I would guess that just as the mon-fri workweek emerged as a standard, companies may adopt standard ways of dividing up the work weeks for part-timers, making it easier for schedules to mesh.
Link
http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2012/11/the-biggest-economic-story-of-2013.html#disqus_thread
Yep, this is one of the unintended consequences that tend to harm precisely those that liberalism claims to want to help.
The ones who will suffer most from this egregious meddling in the employment contract will be those who voted for four more years of Obama. Somehow I’m not so sure this isn’t just punishment for not thinking, and a good thing for conservatism. It won’t be just our theory anymore, it will be reality. Soon.
We can say we told you so, and we may be listened to this time.
Thanks Øbama!
Thanks. The one thing this author wants is proper attribution, and I couldn’t manage it. :)
How about contractors?
Well will Contractors be able to operate as they do now under Obamacare? If they don't buy insurance for themselves now they will be forced to under Obamacare and I doubt if they can eat the cost so they will need to charge more for their services.
Frankly, I won't be an independent contractor much longer, because I can't afford it.
Yeah our IC's informed us they aren't sure how they will proceed.
Except for one. He said he is done and is seeking more aide from the Gub'ment. He is already checking into an Obamaphone. He gets some food stamps and his 2 school age kids get free lunch so apparently he qualifies. (His older kids moved back in with him cause they lost their jobs so his income level is way low for 5 adults and 4 kids in the household.)
Just another day in the Obamanation.
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