California's current political context, with Democratic super-majorities in both Houses and a leftist, progressive (Democratic, of course) governor, means that it's possible for California to advance outrageously crazy bills and get them signed by the governor. For some reason, I keep getting surprised when they do so.
Here's another one in the works – it hasn't passed yet, but the oracles are predicting that it will.
The problem his new bill is addressing is one of those features of ObamaCare with supposedly unforeseen consequences – that were actually completely foreseen by many critics: the “employer mandate” that requires any employer of more than 50 full-time workers. Many employers in the service sector (restaurants, movie theaters, hotels, etc.) will simply move as many employees as possible from full time to part time. If you're running a business, this is an obvious tactic to avoid the (large) additional expenses of ObamaCare. Of course they're going to move those workers to part time – and they should, in order to keep their prices low and competitive. Any business that didn't would instantly become less efficient and less competitive than it should be.
So imagine you're a California legislator. What do you do in the face of this? Well, of course what you do is outlaw moving workers to part time! Make it illegal for a business to run efficiently, or to compete effectively – yeah, that's the ticket!
The drums of doom beat ever closer. Especially in California...
That's insane. Management of retail chains revolve largely around management of employee hours as that is the largest, adjustable cost. It is frequent they cut hours certain times of year, increase others but always to keep the minimum they can to keep costs down. They typically keep more people on staff (part time) than they actually need and adjust hours so that they have a pool of people to cover times when people are sick or they need more help for inventory or whatever. All this will do is have them lay off significant numbers of part time workers so that the managers (who are salaried and exempt) have to pick up the slack by working addition hours at NO extra pay. This already happens to some degree in retail chains. Corporate says they need to reduce hours by x percent. Well, the work doesn't go away and so exempt employees pick up the slack.
ReplyDeleteSo you end up with a lot of people that may have had some work, having no work and also no healthcare, and those that already had healthcare having to work significantly harder and longer hours for no additional pay.
Larry