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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (737905)	9/8/2013 2:08:39 PM
From: i-node	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1578902

>> And yet the average work week has remained fairly static for months now. >> The Obama administration is saying that these complaints of companies going to part time employment to avoid Obamacare is more anecdotal than empirical. If they are wrong or worse, misleading the public, wouldn't the average work week become shorter? The White House is using a little statistical time-shifting here. Most of the announced hours cutbacks had not gone into effect when the compliance deadline was illegally extended. For example, Forever 21 announced its transition to part-time was effective August 31. Community College of Allegheny County cut hours for 200 people effective December 31. Even Darden was only doing trial runs in a couple of cities. The cuts are coming; but they're not going to be reflected in statistics until they actually happen. Still, you can't ignore the fact that hundreds of organizations have announced cuts. Now, it is true that many of them are unwilling to come out and flatly blame Obamacare, as they don't want to deal with a backlash. But it is what it is.

To: tejek who wrote (737905)	9/8/2013 4:08:16 PM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1578902

Hi tejek; Re: "Last year, six full-time jobs were created for every one part time job. This year, only one full-time job is being created for every four new part-time jobs." And yet the average work week has remained fairly static for months now." We agree that hiring part time workers should skew the average work week to be shorter. And we (probably) also agree that increasing overtime makes the average work week longer. Now think about how a business responds to a sudden increase in health care costs at the full time level. If an employee is given overtime (or his time is increased from 35 hours to 40 hours), there is no change in the health care costs for the business. Similarly, if an employee is reduced from 35 hours down to 30 hours the health care costs can be avoided. So the natural response of employers to Obamacare is to reduce the hours of some workers to get them below the requirement, while increasing the hours of those workers who have to be kept on full time. The overall effect could very well be that there is little net change to the average work week. In other words, to really get information on the effect of Obamacare you need to look at something with more precise information than just the average work week. You really need to look at the distribution of hours per week. My guess is that the effect of Obamacare is to reduce the number of people with just under 40 hours per week and increase those with 40 hours or more, and also increase those with less than 30 hours. -- Carl