In order to avoid paying for insurance benefits mandated by President Obama’s health care law, employers are moving rapidly to shift their workforce to more part-time and temporary employees.

Employers are also finding other strategies to minimize their exposure to the law’s heavy regulatory burdens, according to Grace-Marie Turner, president of the Galen Institute.

“ObamaCare is the single biggest deterrent to job creation in our economy,” said Turner. “And it is hurting those at the lower end of the income scale the hardest. Young people can’t get a job to get their foot on the economic ladder. People with minimum wage jobs are being cut from fulltime to part-time to meet the law’s arbitrary definition of 30 hours as full-time work. And employers are seriously considering getting out of the business of providing health coverage altogether.”
John Goodman, president and CEO of the National Center for Policy Analysis, said this trend was spreading beyond the private sector.
“It’s more important than people realize, and it’s not just in the private sector. It’s in the public sector, as well. It’s in school districts, county governments, and others moving people to part-time work,” Goodman said. “The reason they’re doing it now is because in the law there’s going to be a 12-month look-back, starting January 1st, 2014, in deciding how many employees you have and deciding who’s full-time and who is part-time. That’s why it’s affecting the job market right this very moment.”

Goodman said anecdotal evidence and other reports indicate a widespread problem.

“There are news articles about what the county governments are doing, the school districts, local employers,” Goodman said. “It’s not a small thing. We’re talking about tens of thousands of workers. I’m convinced that one of the reasons why recovery has been so slow is Obamacare. Employers are reluctant to make part-time workers full-time workers because of the financial costs imposed by health reform.”
The IRS Is Watching

According to Goodman, creative methods for businesses to share employees cooperatively to avoid the law’s limits would probably draw attention from the Internal Revenue Service.

“That would be risky. The IRS has already said if you have two restaurants, those aren’t two businesses, those are one business,” Goodman said. “And it’s also said they’re going to count two part-time workers as one full-time equivalent. So they’ve already become pretty aggressive in how they’re going to interpret the law.”

Goodman said he expects a trend toward more contract and temporary labor supplanting full time employees.

“If you’re sophisticated about it, apparently you can even have the worker come and work part of the time at your office and still not count as an employee. But they’re going to do things like ask the employee to pay the most that they can ask the employee to pay and still count as ‘affordable’ under the law,” Goodman said

Unanticipated Reactions

Jeffrey Anderson, director of the Benjamin Rush Society, said the hour cutbacks were another unanticipated reaction to Obama’s law.

“In their determined effort to overhaul American medicine against the clear wishes of the American people, President Obama and congressional Democrats apparently didn't even have enough foresight to anticipate that, if they compelled businesses to provide expensive insurance meeting federal approval for employees who work more than 30 hours a week, businesses might be savvy enough to react by cutting workers' hours to less than 30 hours a week,” Anderson said.

Anderson describes this problem as a result of the overarching philosophy of “government-by-coercion.”

“When the government aims to solve perceived problems by trying to force free citizens to do what the government thinks they should do, those people will look for legal loopholes,” Anderson said. “The result often leads to a solution that no one wants—in this case, workers getting fewer hours—in addition to less liberty for all.“

Employers need to do this to save their businesses.

Too bad gubament don't cut to part-timers.

They could employ more workers and cut tax payer costs.

certainly it would be the benefit to most of us if congress was only PT....then they couldn't DO anything. that would be a gift


in the OP though - getting back to that - most of the issues regarding PT/FT/contract employment has already been happening, and much of it before Obama was even a name on the lips of naieve American voters.

manufacturers have been using contract employees for years to offset the cost of benefits for their FT staff. That is nothing new. What is new is trying to figure out if those unfortunate enough to have to work 2 PT jobs are going to somehow be penalized if the IRS decides to consider that equivalent to FT for the purposes of healthcare taxation (yes, obamacare is little more than taxation without representation....tea anyone?) lol

Gov't works? Well, I guess if you have a title in gov't it means you have a job

What do they care? They make the same wage whether they actually do any work or not, and when they found out Obozocare was going to touch them, they just voted themselves exempt! Guess that can be defined as "working", huh? Probably got upset when they found out that the only way they could exempt themselves was to exempt every other gov't employee as well (left less of the pie to loot).