Health Care Thoughts: California Assembly Bill 880 (pending
by Tom aka Rusty Rustbelt
Health Care Thoughts: California Assembly Bill 880 (pending)
It was a no brainer to predict Obamacare would have a major impact on restaurant and retail employers, especially in the throes of a weak economy. The composition of the work forces and often slim margins guarantee problems.
Darden Corp. (Red Lobster and Olive Garden) is infamous for whining and threatening layoffs, and of course Wal-Mart is well know as the “evil empire” of employers (the ACA part-time employment provision is often referred to as the “Wal-Mart loophole).
A clear result of Obamacare was for employers to consider cutting as many employees as possible under 30 hours. In California this would make many employees of corporate giants eligible for Medi-Cal, and California politicians are not happy, thus the pending legislation.
Employers with more than 500 employees would pay a penalty (possibly $6,000 or more per year) to the state treasury for every employee on Medi-Cal. This appears to apply to seasonal workers, although the commentaries I have read are rather murky on the details. More research to follow. This could have a major impact on seasonal agricultural employment.
It occurs to me one solution would be to reduce the number of part-time employees and just make the full-time employees work harder. I’m not certain that is what the Assembly intends.
Stay tuned, this is a giant laboratory.
Thanks, Tom.
It occurs to me that the 6000 dollar penalty is going a long way toward an effective increase in the minimum wage to pay employees enough so they could afford health insurance and maybe even that “increase in benefits” that some are calling for in social security — without saying how to pay for it (except of course, “tax the rich.”
i don’t quite see how all this could be negotiated among the players with real power, but it’s the direction i would take.
Rusty,
As a small business employer (unlike coberly, who is a retiree on the dole), I think your supposition is spot on. You would be crazy not to cut hours under 30.
They will work the current employees that much harder, and as to excess labor, that’s “off the books.”
I am sending Dan a post on Obamacare-meets-immigration. It could get worse.
Sammy
I don’t care what you think, but in case anyone else out there has forgotten
Social Security is not the dole. It was designed carefully exactly to be not the dole. The workers pay for it themselves.
Sammy is not smart enough to understand that, but you should be.
Sad to say, it’s both the criminal right and the idiot left who don’t want you to understand this. The right wants you to think you are paying for someone else’s greedy granny. The left wants to make the rich pay for your retirement. You ought to be smart enough to understand why neither of those make sense.