Posted on 12/10/2012 3:03:18 AM PST by lowbridge
After making a big deal of publicly supporting the Affordable Care Act, Walmart—the nation’s largest private sector employer—is joining the ranks of companies seeking to avoid their obligation to provide employees with health insurance as required by Obamacare.
It was not all that many years ago that Walmart announced, in response to harsh criticism over the low pay provided to Walmart ‘associates’, that the company would provide a healthcare benefit to its part-time, low earning employees. The uncharacteristically generous nod to worker needs was short lived as the company partially pulled back on the commitment in 2011, citing premium rate increases that Walmart deemed beyond their capacity to pay.
Now, Huffington Post is reporting that the party is over for many more existing Walmart employees, along with all employees hired after February 1, 2012 that the company can classify as “part-time.”
According to the 2013 Walmart “Associate’s Benefit Book”—the manual for low-level Walmart employees—part-time workers who got their jobs during or after 2011 will now be subject to an “Annual Benefits Eligibility Check” each August.
Employees hired after Feb. 1, 2012, who fail to average the magic 30-hours per week requiring a company to provide a healthcare benefit, will lose their healthcare benefits on the following January. Part-time workers hired after Jan. 15, 2011, but before Feb. 1, 2012, will be able to hang onto their Walmart health care benefit if they work at least 24 hours a week.
Anyone hired before 2011 will not be cut off from the company provided health insurance.
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
Giggles aside, I cant for the life of me understand why Walmart and Sams never ventured into health insurance.....they were certainly big enough and they had their hands in everything else.... I would have liked to see a budget minded health plan with alacarte options
The poster is not.. I agree.. Don’t like your current job find a new one..
He’s not kidding, and he’s right. You’re no more obligated to stay with any particular employer than an employer is to keeping you, so smart employees will stick with,an employer until they have learned something useful, then move on as quickly as possible.
However, in regards to your concern about wages, the problem with Walmart is not the wages. You do earn enough to survive.
The real problem is that the ability, to learn useful skills, has been strangled. We’ve created a situation where the only way to learn marketable skills is to completely be able to devote years of your time learning a skill, with no guarantee of employment. Not everybody has the capability to take those years off, so they are trapped.
There used to be a time where you could have no skills whatsoever. However, if somebody hired you, and you might have to start sweeping floors or shovelling manure, so to speak, over time you would gain marketable skills. Unfortunately, thanks to government interference by subsidizing education, it has become uneconomical to do that.
The real solution is not to just keep bumping up the minimal wage, but to make it possible for people to acquire marketable skills in their spare time, as they are able to do it, however they can. If all they got is 15 minutes per day, a couple of times a week, they should, over time, be able to use that somehow to improve their situation
“People who make excuses for Roberts give me a pain. Why wouldn’t it have been easier and faster just to follow the constitution and declare Bozocare unconstitutional, which it is, regardless of what Roberts said at the time.”
Yours is the money comment here today! The SCOTUS is just another disgraceful part of the “government” of this country! They might try working for the benefit of the rest of us for a change! They are more interested in “their institution” for it’s own sake than for what they are supposed to be doing for the country. Have you ever noticed that most “judges” use their middle names, like they are more important than the rest of us?
I didn’t. Unlike yourself, I don’t support liberals.
You absolutely did your best to make sure Obama was reelected.
Roberts put a knife into the strategy of using the courts to advance the liberal agenda. He put Obamacare into a position where it can be voted down, with a single vote. In my view, he did more harm than good. If had ruled it unconstitutional, he would have merely continued to give the liberal agenda continued means to advance their agenda through the courts. Obamacare might have been struck down, because but the liberals would have just continued to bring their arguments forward, until they got what they wanted.
Now they can’t do that.
Ask around. See how easy it is to get a job. Even low-paying ones.
Obviously, this depends on the sector, willingness to relocate, etc. But it’s a tough market out there, and a lot of otherwise hard-working, intelligent people are stuck.
Not everybody can relocate, that is true. But everybody is capable of increasing their personal skill set, as they have the time to do so.
Want to reduce poverty, that’s where it needs to be done. Just arbitrarily increasing the minimum wage only makes it more difficult for the bottom to find jobs, and it’s a shell game.
“In my view, he did more harm than good.”
Are you sure you meant to say this? Because the rest of your post seems to suggest just the opposite. In your opinion, did Roberts do the right thing or the wrong thing?
I’m sorry. I was typing that on my phone. I meant that he did more good than harm.
When liberals were advancing their agenda through the courts, Congress and the President would just roll over, once the Supreme Court ruled in the activist’s favour, which it often did.
However, Roberts has essentially put a knife through court activism by stating that these decisions are to be made through Congress.
Whether Obamacare is good or bad for the country, it can be eliminated through Congress. We don’t have to worry about the Supreme Court running with the ball on this.
Used to be able to get a job at the local factory, farm, machine shop, construction site, restaurant, whatever, and work your way up. A lot of these jobs either a) don’t exist anymore or b) have been filled by droves of illegals or c) priced out by unions or d) have been marginalized by the high bar of the margin between working vs. gov’t bennies.
Those jobs once did not exist, they existed, and now they don’t. That’s not new. The market place is continually changing.
What has changed is that just after WWII, the feds decided to subsidize education to help unemployed GI’s become employable. Unfortunately, they subsidized education to such a point that it became uneconomical for any business to continue to train its own employees, so now businesses don’t.
Since businesses don’t train anymore, they’re expectations have changed. Now, because they are paying taxes for people to spend those years acquiring skills, they expect employees to be able to hit the ground running, in terms of being able to do their jobs.
Consequently, it doesn’t matter if I am of good character, willing to work deadly long hours, and do everything possible to earn a profit for my employer, if I am not a good fit for the way society trains its people, I’m hooped.
Not everybody is a good fit for the way we train people. I’m not. I need to have a deeper understanding of material, than most people to make it work, but our education system is set up to keep people moving, whether they have acquired to necessary skills before moving up or not.
The skill sets have changed. IMHO, it’s similar to the Great Depression. Industrialization lowered costs in so many fields it became uneconomical to pay people, and cyclically, there was less money to purchase goods.
Computerization, tax & regulatory hurdles, lawsuits, etc. have now done the same thing to our recent milieu.
Other than the service (and government) sectors, I don’t see what the new skill set is supposed to be.
My advice to young ‘uns is that college is no guarantee.
“”If the workers dont like it they can find another job””
“You’re kidding, right?”
I must be kidding because its unheard of for dissatisfied employees to seek other job opportunities. But seriously, why do think that is so outrageous that it must be a joke? Do you think walmart workers are so stupid they cant possibly find higher paying jobs? Are they being forced to work for the company against their will? Maybe you think there are no other jobs for them to go to? If that’s the case it’s because of people like you who prefer to dictate to businesses how to run their operations, based on “feelings” and without regard to financial realities. You drive businesses out of the country or to bankruptcy and harm the people you claim be helping. You dont like Walmart, fine, dont shop there, but dont presume you and your ilk know how to run the company better than the owners.
They get what they voted for.
ABSOLUTELY
It’s not a case of skill sets changing, as skill sets have always changed. Candle stick makers used to make a lot of money in their day, now you can buy a candle for a dime. Skill sets will always change.
What has changed is the paradigm. It used to be that they employer would assume the training and he’d absorb all costs, so it was worthwhile to take on an apprentice. There would be costs in hiring one, but that apprentice would be paid according to his ability to generate revenue. It also had the side benefit of causing employers and employees to commit to each other, because they both benefited from the relationship. The employer was willing to shell out for training, because the learned training would generate increased revenue and the employee stuck around, because as he increased his skills, his income would rise. It was a mutually beneficial relationship.
That’s why people could start for an employer, when young, and retire with that same employer.
That was then... You need to stop living in the past and live in the present.. Besides I don’t recall anything in the Constitution about a good paying job being a right.
The bottom line is that Roberts voted with Kagan, Sotomayor and Ginsburg. The rest is moot.
I'm convinced....
History will repeat.
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