Around the mid 1980s a contractor who drove a trash removal truck for Procter and Gamble in Cincinnati decided to retire after 30 years. He found he had no pension, sued P&G and won. The court ruled he was an employee and had a right to the same pension they offered other employees. To protect employees from being called contractors and denied benefits the IRS came up with a number of questions, I believe nineteen, to which the answer "yes" to any one of them defined an employee versus an independent contractor. On of the questions involved the individual working more than 999 hours in any year.
There is a lot more I could say but to suffice it to say: an individual who works less than 20 hours a week / less than 999 hours in a year may be excluded from various benefits offered by the company to those folks who work a thousand hours or more in a year.
Now we have what we affectionately refer to as Obama-care.
Section 1513 of the Affordable Care Act covers "shared responsibility for employers regarding health coverage." The law requires that every employer with 50 or more "full-time employees" offer "minimum essential coverage" in an "affordable" manner. Employees that don't comply, if that non-compliance results in at least one worker accepting Obama-care exchange subsidies, face steep fines.
A "full-time employee" is someone who works at least 120 hours per month, or about 30 hours a week. Importantly, employers will also have to add up the total hours worked by part-timers, and divide by 120, to count toward that total. So, for example, three employees who each work 80 hours a week would count as two full-time employees (240 total hours divided by two). For this reason, employers who restrict their workers to 29 hours a week may not successfully evade the employer mandate.
In the Procter and Gamble example I mentioned above steps government took to protect individuals from being denied benefits annoyed and hurt a lot of contractors as well as employers. Government must be big to enforce moral views so folks who want government to enforce theirs must accept that that same big government will do things they do not like such as Obama-care.
I figure cost saving measures to permit payment of large bonuses to senior executives will require that Dollywood as well as other employers restrict the number of hours worked by their "part-time / seasonal" "employees."
Lets all say, "Thank you, Dolly and let us be sure to buy her newest CD which will take about 2 hours of work to pay for.
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Email: jrjenki@gmail.com
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"It is ironic to think that man might determine his own future by something so seemingly trivial as the choice of an insect spray."
---Rachel Carson, Silent Spring
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