Job seekers will soon have a harder time finding full-time work, thanks to Obamacare. As of 2014... it will have the unintended effect of making part-time employees more desirable than full-timers.
... if a business with more than 49 full-time employees fails to offer insurance coverage, it will be required to pay a fine. ...the fine will apply starting not with the 50th employee, but with the 31st. At $2,000 per employee after the first 30, these fines
add up fast. A business that surpasses the threshold by just one full-time employee will face $40,000 each year in penalties.
Businesses that can easily substitute part-time for full-time labor — in particular restaurants, hotels, and retailers — will have a strong incentive to do so.
The
Wall Street Journal reports that Carl’s Jr., Hardee’s, Red Lobster, and Olive Garden are already planning to hire part-timers instead of full-timers at some or all of their locations. Other employers will restrict their current full-time employees to 30 hours a week so that they will be considered part-time under the law. And, of course, some businesses will opt to stay smaller.
France provides an instructive example: There, 50 employees is the magic threshold for whether labor regulations apply. And — no surprise — the country “has more than 2.4 times as many firms with 49 employees as with 50,” Jed Graham
notes in
Investor’s Business Daily.
All this is terrible news for an already bleak labor market. Congressional Budget Office director Doug Elmendorf has estimated that Obamacare as a whole will cost
something like 800,000 jobs, and a CBO analysis noted the pressure that many companies will face to hire fewer full-time workers.
Obamacare vs. Jobs - Jillian Kay Melchior - National Review Online