The End of Full-Time Work in the American Retail Service Sector
5th May 2013
Late last year, within the service world, this change was already occurring – at restaurants, at hotels, and in retail stores, managers were already formulating plans. In a large sense, by making this prediction, I was betting on the score of a game that had already been played — all we are doing now is waiting for the media to catch up and report the results to the public at large.
And you can thank Obama for putting the final nail in its head. Aren’t you proud?
But one thing has been very clear: The best way to be “safe” and avoid the costs imposed by the law was to have one’s workers be classified as “part-time”, or for this particular law working less than 30 hours per week. The other fact that emerged from some IRS rule-making (yes, the IRS is in charge of creating and enforcing many of the rules, and doesn’t that make you feel better) was that whether a worker was to be classified as part-time on January 1, 2014 would be based on his or her work patterns in 2013. This is why savvy companies, including ours, were planning hard for work force changes last year. Our goal was to get every worker in the company under 30 hours a week before 2013 even started.
All part of the long-term Democrat program to make every American who isn’t a Scion of the Crust one of the welfare-dependent class.
The service industry generally does not operate 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, so its labor needs do not match traditional full-time shifts. Those of us who run service companies already have to piece together multiple employees and shifts to cover our operating hours. In this environment, there is no reason one can’t stitch together employees making 29 hours a week (that don’t have to be given expensive health care policies) nearly as easily as one can stitch together 40 hours a week employees. In fact, it can be easier — a store that needs to cover 10AM to 9PM can cover with two 5.5 hour a day employees. If they work 5 days a week, that is 27.5 hours a week, safely part-time. Three people working such hours with staggered days off can cover the store’s hours for 7 days.
Based on the numbers above, a store might actually prefer to only have sub-30 hour shifts, but may have, until recently, provided full-time 40 hours work because good employees expect it and other employers were offering it. In other words, they had to offer full-time work because competition in the labor market demanded it. But if everyone in the service business stops offering full-time work, the competitive pressure to offer anything but part-time jobs will be gone. The service business may never go back.
How soon before erstwhile fully-employed middle-class people drop below the ‘poverty line’ (which keeps inching upward) and start depending on SNAP and Medicaid to keep body and soul together? We see before us the modern equivalent of the Company Store: The politicians who provide you with food and education and health care are going to demand (and get) your vote, or else the trough goes empty. Like immigrants at the turn of the 20th century, what used to be the backbone of the country are going to be working two or three jobs just to keep afloat.