I Hate to Say I Told You So, But Retail Sector Full-Time Work At An End
I have to say I told you so, but, from a reader, Staples threatens to fire anyone who works over 25 hours:
Part-time Staples workers are furious that they could be fired for working more than 25 hours a week.
The company implemented the policy to avoid paying benefits under the Affordable Care Act, reports Sapna Maheshwari at Buzzfeed. The healthcare law mandates that workers with more than 30 hours a week receive healthcare.
If Staples doesn't offer benefits, it could be fined $3,000 in penalties per person.
I can tell you from personal experience that $3000 is a staggering penalty. For a full time worker at $8 an hour, this is over 2 months pay -- 2 months pay extra the company has to pay but the worker never sees.
As I have written before, we have moved heaven and Earth to get every employee we can in our company converted to part-time. We had absolutely no alternative -- after seeking quotes from about 20 places, no one would offer our company any sort of health insurance plan at any price**. So no matter what we did, we were facing the $3000 penalty for each full-time workers, so all we could do to manage the situation was convert full-time workers to part-time.
** We have seasonal workers, which makes insuring us awkward and expensive because there are high administrative costs with people constantly going on and off the plan. We also have a very old work force. Obamacare prevents insurers from charging the much higher premiums to older people that our costs might justify -- it milks younger people with prices well above their cost to serve to pay for subsidizing older people. Insurers would be crazy to voluntarily add groups that are purely old people, they would lose their shirt. So they refuse to quote us.
