Darden Restaurants Cut Workers' Hours to Avoid Paying Health Care Coverage

Opposing View ^ | 10/9/2012 | By Michael Allen

[tobyhill]

Darden Restaurants has stopped offering full-time schedules to many hourly workers in a few of its Olive Garden, Red Lobster and LongHorn Steakhouse eateries.

Darden is reportedly taking the action to avoid the Affordable Care Act, which is scheduled to go into effect in 2014, reports Fox 35 (video below). Under that law, also known as Obamacare, companies must provide affordable health insurance to employees working an average of at least 30 hours per week.

[joe212]

Serious question:

Does this really work? Does a person working less than 30 hours really not count towards the total number of employees, either to avoid being over 50 employees, or to not pay Obamacare employer penalty for that employee?

[Uncle Miltie]

Never could have seen this coming! Bureaucrats are all knowing.

[ex91B10]

"This is a business decision in the best interest of the company’s owners, the shareholders"

No it isn't. Workers will find other employment (restraunt work is not hard to come by) and Darden companies will go belly up.

The Kenyan must go.

[tbw2]

The waivers were annual things - so you have to keep kissing up to keep your Obamacare exemption.
The other interesting thing is the 30 hours per week threshold. In most other areas, 39 hours or less is part time. Obamacare mandates coverage at full time of THIRTY hours per week. So you can be part time under most rules but full time under Obamacare, at 32 or 35 hours per week.

[MarkL]

And the inevitable flood of unintended consequences begins.

There's no way this was "unintended." Everyone behind "Obamacare" knew this was inevitable, and is just one step in moving the country to socialized medicine... Get employers to drop their private insurance, while at the same time, putting financial constraints on insurers who won't "play nice" with the government, effectively putting them out of business. The "dumb masses" will demand that the government offer insurance for everyone.

Mark

[staytrue]

This could explain the huge increase in part time jobs in the last employment figures.

You downgrade people to part time and add more part time workers to make up the difference.

GDP remains sluggish but unemployment falls but U-6 (unemployment plus workers involutarily working part time) remains high at 14 %.

[ExTxMarine]

This is just one of the many “unintended consequences” of ALL liberal plans and ideas! And it should serve as PROOF that liberals do not understand human nature nor business acumen!

Let’s take the Community Reinvestment Act as an example. On the surface, the idea that helping people own more homes sounds GREAT! Home ownership builds communities and helps people identify with a region and set roots for further development. So, if you look at the basic premise behind it, it looks really good, so let’s pass this law!

Now, let’s look at reality (which liberals do not and can not understand). Home ownership is great IF YOU WORK FOR IT. If it is given to you, then like any expected gift (like socks from you GrandMa), the value to you is either missed or fleeting. Next, companies are REQUIRED to attempt to make money. Fiduciary duty requires that all parties do their best to represent the investor’s interest in making money; so, when the rules changed (you MUST make risky loans), the companies simply created another way to make money (bundling, packaging and selling the loans); contrary to popular belief, this was NOT illegal, immoral nor nefarious - it was a business decision based on making profits for investors! Since these customers were never really interested in “owning a home,” they were only interested in getting the loan and having a place to live, they were not interested in developing nor settling in nor building the “community!”

When the economy finally broke, the loans were shown to be worthless. The home owners were shown to be living well beyond their means. So, ultimately, as can be seen by the sea of vacant, repossessed homes, and the masses without any valid residence or “investment wealth” (since that is what a large portion of America uses their homestead as - investment wealth), the Community Reinvestment Act sounded great on paper BUT, when faced with human nature and business acumen, the CRA was shown to be a complete and total FAILURE!

I do NOT look forward to the dismal results which will bore out with the complete implementation of ObamaCare!