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Former President Obama deserves more credit for the strong U.S. economy than President Trump, according to MSNBC's Joe Scarborough. "Yeah, it's a strong economy," Scarborough told "Morning Joe" co-host Mika Brzezinski. "But Mika, this is not an economy that Donald Trump gave us. This is an economy that's part of the seven year ongoing recovery." Scarborough also said this "isn't the greatest economy ever" and that it "isn't close to the greatest economy ever." "Barack Obama had more people getting jobs his last 16 or 18 months than they had jobs during Donald Trump's first 16 or 18 months," he...

The “workamper” jobs range from helping harvest sugar beets to flipping burgers at baseball spring training games to Amazon’s AMZN, +2.87% “CamperForce,” seasonal employees who can walk the equivalent of 15 miles a day during Christmas season pulling items off warehouse shelves and then returning to frigid campgrounds at night. Living on less than $1,000 a month, in certain cases, some have no hot showers. As Bruder writes, these are “people who never imagined being nomads.” Many saw their savings wiped out during the Great Recession or were foreclosure victims and, writes Bruder, “felt they’d spent too long losing a...

Just over six years ago, in December of 2010, we wrote "Charting America's Transformation To A Part-Time Worker Society", in which we predicted - and showed - that in light of the underlying changes resulting from the second great depression, whose full impacts remain masked by trillions in monetary stimulus and soon, perhaps fiscal, America is shifting from a traditional work force, one where the majority of new employment is retained on a full-time basis, to a "gig" economy, where workers are severely disenfranchised, and enjoy far less employment leverage, job stability and perks than their pre-crash peers. It also...

While the kneejerk reaction algos were focusing on the +223K jobs number reported by the Establishment Survey, few if anyone notched that the Household survey reported a decline of 56,000 workers in June. But what's worse, is that according to this survey which according to some is far more reliable than its peer, the composition of the US labor force once again deteriorated rapidly with part-time jobs added in June surging by 161,000 while the number of full time jobs tumbled by 349,000. Putting this number in context, while the total number of US workers has long since surpassed its...

Tucked away in the pages of a new report by the U.S. General Accounting Office is a startling statistic: 40.4% of the U.S. workforce is now made up of contingent workers—that is, people who don’t have what we traditionally consider secure jobs. There is currently a lot of debate about how contingent workers should be defined. To arrive at the 40.4 %, which the workforce reached in 2010, the report counts the following types of workers as having the alternative work arrangements considered contingent. (The government did some rounding to arrive at its final number, so the numbers below add...

The next wave of ObamaCare insurance cancellations is under way, flying largely under the national media radar… until Wal-Mart announced it would be dropping coverage for all its part-time employees.

Everyday Low Benefits Wal-Mart dumps 30,000 part-timers onto the ObamaCare exchanges. Oct. 7, 2014 7:25 p.m. ET Wal-Mart endorsed ObamaCare in 2009 and helped drag the bill through Congress, and so far it hasn’t recanted. By holding back economic growth and incomes, perhaps the law is expanding the retailer’s customer base. Another plus—at least for management—is that Wal-Mart can jettison its employees into the ObamaCare insurance exchanges. The Associated Press reported Tuesday that the largest U.S. private employer is dropping health benefits for some 30,000 workers, or about 5% of its part-time workforce. Earlier health-plan eligibility triage in 2011 had...

In a new working paper from the Mercatus Center, University of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan projects that the Affordable Care Act will reduce weekly employment per person by 3 percent, or roughly 4 million full-time-equivalent workers. These new estimates are significantly higher than the 2.5 million reduction in labor supply estimated by the Congressional Budget Office earlier this year. To be clear, a reduction in labor supply differs from a reduction in labor demand—a distinction many failed to recognize when the CBO first released estimates. It is not the case that the ACA will necessarily forces employees out; rather, the...

As the 800-pound gorilla of retailers, Wal-Mart made national headlines when it announced on Tuesday that it was cutting the health benefits for its 30,000 employees who work fewer than 30 hours a week. A company blog post put the move down to rising healthcare costs, but the 30-hour cut-off gives a clue as to the real cause - President Barack Obama's healthcare reform. Under the Affordable Care Act, large companies are required, starting this January, to provide subsidised healthcare for every employee who works 30-hours a week or more. As the Atlantic's David A Graham notes, many of the...

Walmart announced today that as of the beginning of next year it will be dropping health insurance for 30,000 employees who work less than 30 hours per week. So why is this a good thing? It may involve some hassle for individual employees, as they’ll have to go to the exchange to figure out what plan to get. But most of those Walmart workers will likely come out ahead. Someone who’s earning $9 an hour working 30 hours a week at a Walmart would be making $13,500 a year. Depending on what their spouse makes and what state they’re in,...

Wal-Mart says it's cutting health benefits to part-timers and boosting worker premiums. If a retail empire built on low prices can't find a way around ObamaCare's added costs, we are all doomed.

Wal-Mart, the country's largest retailer, is eliminating health benefits for about 30,000 employees to control its rising healthcare costs. The cut applies to part-timers who work fewer than 30 hours a week, Wal-Mart said Tuesday. It impacts 2% of the company's U.S. workforce. More of Wal-Mart's employees signed up for health benefits this year than the company expected, which boosted the company's costs.. Obamacare requires everyone to have coverage, which has prompted people to compare plans available to them at work with plans offered on government exchanges. The cheapest and most popular Wal-Mart plan currently costs employees as little as...

Is this the reason for the blowout, on the surface, payroll number? In June the BLS reports that the number of full-time jobs tumbled by 523K to 118.2 million while part-time jobs soared by 799K to over 28 million! Looking at the breakdown of full and part-time jobs so far in 2014, we find that 926K full-time jobs were added to the US economy. The offset: 646K part-time jobs. Something tells us that the fact that the BLS just reported June part-time jobs rose by just shy of 800,000 the biggest monthly jump since 1993, will hardly get much airplay...

During a Google Hangout session on Friday, fry cook Darnell Summers told President Obama that his hours were cut due to the Affordable Care Act. “We were broken down to part time to avoid paying health insurance,” he said. Summers explained that he makes $7.25 an hour and has been on strike four times seeking a wage increase. “We can’t survive, it’s not livin’,” he said. The president responded by urging states to increase the minimum wage. “I am working to encourage states, governors, mayors, state legislators to raise their own minimum wage,” Obama said. “Obviously, the way to reach...

Does anyone else find this chart shocking?Here’s the source. I was looking up the proportion of part-time versus full-time workers to see if the passage of ObamaCare had any noticeable impact.(Note: Be sure to look carefully at the left and right axes. It’s not that the whole composition of the workforce has flipped.)I don’t think you can pin the blame on ObamaCare in isolation (it passed in March 2010), but the so-called Great Recession has been qualitatively worse than the dot-com bust. My short explanation is that the combination of economic turmoil and “regime uncertainty” in general (not just ObamaCare)...

Some school districts and state and local governments are limiting part-time workers’ hours or letting them go to comply with the Affordable Care Act. And it’s not all political. This month in Delaware, which has embraced the health law, officials decided to limit all casual and seasonal employees, including substitute teachers, to fewer than 30 hours a week to save on health insurance. About 376 workers from education, corrections, and homeland security agencies could be affected. In Pennsylvania, at least 10 school districts have slashed hours or outsourced their workers, including bus drivers, food service workers, and instructional aides. In...

There is little evidence that employers are sacrificing full-time jobs by hiring more part-timers or reducing existing employee hours because of the costs of providing health coverage under Obamacare. … “We are not seeing any effect in the data,” Jason Furman, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, told Reuters Insider. Part of the reason may be the White House’s decision to delay the beginning of Obamacare’s so-called “employer mandate” until January 2015. Under the mandate, which was previously due to take effect in January 2014, firms with more than 50 employees must provide reasonable healthcare insurance to...

Under the Affordable Care Act, someone making less than 138 percent of the poverty line qualifies for Medicaid, and someone between 138 and 400 percent of the poverty line is qualified to receive a federal tax subsidy for health insurance bought on a government exchange. But here is the problem: premiums will rise for millions of Americans because of requirements that policies provide certain benefits that they didn’t offer before. This means plenty of people will now have a pricier plan, and no way to defray the cost. My colleague Chuck Blahous sends me this piece from SFGate that gives...

Avita Samuels has worked at the Mall of America in Minneapolis for the last four years, juggling a sales job with her studies in political science and law at the University of Minnesota. The 24-year-old has been the top sales associate for the last three years and works between 29 and 35 hours a week. But over the past few months, she said, she has watched as friends working in stores around her have their hours and benefits slashed – and she's worried that she will be next. Forever 21, the clothing store, told staff last month in a memo...

tate Employer Action Jobs with fewer hours, if specified Date of Action or Report Alabama Houston County Public Cut hours of part-time employees to fewer than 30 per week Sep-13 California Biola University Private Cut student work hours to a maximum of 25 per week; suspended limit due to employer mandate delay Sep-13 Florida Bealls Inc. (Department Stores) Private Restricted part-time hours to fewer than 30 per week Sep-13 Florida SeaWorld Entertainment Private Cut hours for part-time workers from a maximum of 32 to 28 per week Sep-13