Tuesday, May 19, 2015

Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, Americans no longer forced to work full time for Health care coverage, choose parttime jobs instead.

There were a lot of corporate threats thrown around about turning full-time workers into parttimers due to the Affordable Care Act. It didn't happen when corporate bosses had to deal with reality. Center for Economic and Policy Research:
The claims about low enrollment figures were shot down in April, when it came to light
that enrollment had surged during the previous month. It’s time that we shelved the critique about part-time work as well. 
click to enlarge
The graph to the right shows a huge drop in involuntary parttime work, the kind threatened by employers like Papa Johns, and an increase in people choosing to just work parttime:  
Specifically, there’s good reason to think the ACA could be leading to greater voluntary part-time employment. To explain: if an employee is working part-time and would like to work full-time, his or her status as part-time is a negative; that employee would like to work more, but hasn't been given the opportunity to do so. 

However, if an employee is voluntarily working part-time, it means that he or she is making an active decision to pursue part-time employment. Since health insurance was linked to a worker’s status as a full-time employee before the ACA went into effect, many Americans worked full-time simply to receive health insurance benefits; this was true even for workers who otherwise would have preferred to work part-time. Thanks to the ACA, workers no longer have to work full-time in order to receive insurance, meaning they can work fewer hours if they want to, assuming they can still pay the bills.

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