Monday, July 15, 2013

Restaurants Replace Full-Timers, Concerned About Insurance [Obamacare destroys full time jobs]

Wall St. Journal ^ | July 14, 2013

Ken Adams has been turning to more part-time workers at his 10 Subway sandwich shops in Michigan to avoid possibly incurring higher health-care costs under the new federal insurance law.
He added approximately 25 part-time workers in May and June as he reduced some employees' hours and replaced other workers who left. The move showed how efforts by some restaurant owners and other businesses to remake their workforces because of the Affordable Care Act may be turning the country's labor market into a more part-time workforce.
"I'd be surprised if the Affordable Care Act didn't have something to do with" the pickup in part-time hiring, said Paul Dales, senior U.S. economist at Capital Economics. "Companies don't want to pay for health care unnecessarily if they can avoid it, so they'll try to avoid it." However, he said "the effects will be harder to discern in the data."
For the entire U.S. workforce, employers have added far more part-time employees in 2013—averaging 93,000 a month, seasonally adjusted—than full-time workers, which have averaged 22,000. Last year the reverse was true, with employers adding 31,000 part-time workers monthly, compared with 171,000 full-time ones.
The Affordable Care Act requires employers with 50 or more full-time equivalent workers to offer affordable insurance to employees working 30 or more hours a week or face fines. Some companies have said the requirement could increase their costs significantly, although others have played down the potential hit.
The cost for small firms to comply with the health law will depend largely on the number of additional full-time employees that sign up for employer-sponsored coverage. Average annual premiums for employer-sponsored health insurance in 2012 were $5,615 for single coverage and $15,745 for family coverage, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. That is up from $3,083 and $8,003, respectively, in 2002.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...

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