…so they get to pay for private healthcare insurance.
When the company like disney could be inordinately profitable paying a living wage and giving healthcare insurance to all of it’s employees.
So you can get back to me when they are paying their longterm employees a high enough wage that the rest of us don’t have to subsidize disneys profits because of slave wages.
I don’t think I understand. Is there a clause in the ACA that says a company cannot offer health insurance benefits to part-time workers?
Obamacare/the Affordable Care Act requires that employees who work 30 or more hours weekly must be provided health insurance by their employer, or their employer takes a tax hit. This has led to some employers stating that they will cut hours for some staff to 29.5 hours weekly.
Oh, I understand that. It does not apply to companies with less than 50 workers, which is every company I have ever worked for. But I don’t see what changed for Disney and their part-time workers under ACA. If they wanted to extend health care benefits to part-time workers, they could just do that. In fact, they could have done it years ago.
Christ, what a bunch of assholes!
Its fascinating that the same party that wants to depict the corporate bosses as the good and noble job creators and “makers” who do most good things for society (churches, of course, cover all the rest) also paints them as greedy sociopathic creeps happy with ruining people’s lives to save money.
There’s an obvious solution. We should completely disconnect health insurance from employment. Including everyone, whether they work part-time, full-time, self-employed, unemployed, underage, retired, well that makes a large risk pool! And employers would be happy, too. Too bad that goes against the philosophy of punishing the “lazy” or unlucky.
I agree. Access to affordable health care (“affordable” being from free for the very poor to some reasonable percentage of a non-poor person’s income) should be considered a fundamental human right.
Sick people cost the economy a lot of money by missing work or by filling up expensive emergency rooms when a simple visit to the doctor would suffice, so it is not only morally correct to offer affordable health care to everyone but it is also fiscally sensible.
Well, in my company we did the numbers and we had no choice but to cut a portion of our employees back to part-time. We can get the same efficiencies for less money. If you want to stay in business and provide the jobs you all want then it has to be done. Sorry, but not everyone gets to be a winner. Not everyone gets a trophy. Prove you can contribute beyond a rote utilitarian role in my company and you can definitely go places. You want to stay down in the trenches, your choice.
Absolutely. We need single-payer. In the US somehow health care is a status item. What we had was a horribly broken system where employment in a high enough status job could net you health care. To try to make this less unfair Obamacare adds a Rube Goldberg layer on top of a broken system. It’s less awful than the old monstrosity, but still based on a broken model.
This idea that health care is a reward for work is the part that’s deranged. In civil society it’s a right not a reward. It shouldn’t be tied to employment at all.
What’s your company?
I’d like to know so I can avoid using it.
i second your original question. why didn’t they just give health benefits to the 30hr workers? this only nominally has anything to do with obamacare/aca. something else is going on. the bloomberg article mentions that the union will have issue with the promotions. is that where the real story is?
"Walt Disney World is adding enough hours to its part time workers’ rosters to allow them to qualify for Obamacare, helping their workers to get healthcare. "
Wooooaaahhh, thats just, uh very positive and not very accurate.
Disney is offering full time positions to part timers who work over 30 hours and giving them full healthcare if they accept (no word on if they don’t) to avoid paying a $2000 a year fine for each such employee.
These workers are in not “qualifying for obamacare” because of the change. With full time work they are qualifying for Disney healthcare benefits, and Disney is avoiding an obamacare fine.
It sounds like Disney’s going-forward policy is going to be to not have anybody working 30-39 hours a week to keep everyone either below the hours that results in fines, or at full time with benefits.
So, “Disney World converts part timers to full time with benefits to avoid fines” would be more accurate.
Better than cutting hours to avoid providing benefits, of course, but they are doing this because obamacare twisted their arm.
Actually, the way I read the article, Disney is lowering the threshold for full-time status to 30 hours per week. So employees who work 30 hours per week will continue to work 30 hours per week, and now they will be eligible for full-time benefits.
I am outraged that boingboing would use a picture of a guy in a Hobbes outfit instead of Tigger!!
“Too bad that goes against the philosophy of punishing the “lazy” or unlucky.”
And the “blahs”, don’t forget the “blahs”.
Pretty typical. Problem is, employees need more hours to make a living, and the company needs the flexibility to work them more hours. So now some large companies want to get the law changed from 30 hours to 40 hours; meaning they can work employees up to 39 hours without having to provide health insurance. This is spun not as a benefit for the companies but for the benefit of the employees…
I’d be pretty worried if I were you. There’s not much security in working for a company that would go out of business because of a small increase in insurance costs.
Or perhaps you’re not completely familiar with the exact definition of “no choice”?
