‘They said this would be a disaster in terms of jobs,” President Obama shouted on Thursday. “There is no widespread evidence that the Affordable Care Act is hurting jobs.”
At least 30,377 Americans would beg to differ. During their new, Obamacare-generated non-working hours, they might observe that “no widespread evidence” is hardly a categorical denial.
Either Obama flat-out yelled lies at a rally in Largo, Md., or he occupies a bubble as airtight as the International Space Station. Perhaps Obama is encircled by yes persons who insulate him from evidence — “widespread” or otherwise — of the increasing cruelty that Obamacare is unleashing on American workers.
Jed Graham of Investor’s Business Daily has performed an award-worthy public service by cataloguing news reports of private entities and government organizations that have shrunk full-time employees into part-time laborers. Obamacare’s penalties kick in for employers with 50 or more workers who serve at least 30 hours each per week. Cutting these staffers’ schedules to 29 or fewer hours gets bosses off of this hook.
Guess what? Lots of companies and government agencies are telling their employees that they now will work no more than 29 hours per week. For people who previously enjoyed 40-hour workweeks, such a reduction would represent a pay cut of more than 25 percent. Well, these folks probably didn’t need that money anyway.
As of September 25, Graham’s list has grown to 313 employers, from coast to coast. Just among these outfits, Graham has identified 30,377 Americans who already are suffering due to Obamacare. The lucky ones have kept their jobs, albeit now as part-timers. Those less fortunate have seen their positions outsourced or fully terminated.
Consider these examples of the human damage wrought by Obama’s wretched, anti-worker (un)Affordable Care Act:
• Lebanon City, Ohio, reduced the hours of 18 part-time paramedics and firefighters. Safety last?
• Pennsylvania’s Friendship Community, a private group home for disabled adults, has cut 20 workers’ schedules to fewer than 30 hours each. That means job troubles for these employees and, most surely, less personal attention for the already challenged men and women who need their assistance. Social justice anyone?
• Hancock Madison Shelby Educational Services in Indiana chopped the weekly working hours for 48 employees from as many as 37.5 to 28. Good luck to the special-ed students whom they serve.
• Mountain Del, a Colorado Del Taco franchisee, slashed its full-time staff by 100 and limited part-timers to 28 hours per week.
• Georgia’s AAA Parking shifted 250 full-time workers to part-time status.
• NEMF Trucking Company in New Jersey cut 400 dock workers and customer-service personnel from 33 hours per week to 29, maximum.
• Florida’s Buca di Beppo restaurant shifted 400 workers below the 30-hour threshold.
• Utah’s Alpine School District saved $4.2 million by limiting 800 part-timers to 27.5 hours per week.
• In Texas, the Dallas County Community College District capped classroom hours for 2,500 adjunct instructors.
• The Virginia Community College System imposed a 29-hour weekly cap on 1,479 adjunct faculty members and part-time employees. Virginia’s Chesterfield County Public Schools put 2,000 part-time personnel on a ration of 28 hours per week.
IBD lists 302 additional employers whose personnel already are paying the high human cost for Obama’s big-government fantasy. These 313 cases are based on press accounts. No doubt there are hundreds and likely thousands of other employers who have reduced their employees’ hours, if not eliminated their posts outright, but who have not alerted the media about these cutbacks. As ugly a picture as IBD has painted so far, it likely would be even more hideous if revealed in its entirety.
Graham’s IBD articles on this unnecessary tragedy include Excel spreadsheets through which readers themselves can analyze this deepening catastrophe.
Jed Graham promises to keep this list up to date. That may make him the only American whose work hours increase because of Obamacare.
– Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News contributor, a nationally syndicated columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service, and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.
