Trends in Employment: No Full Time Employment

One of the biggest trends in employment right now is happening with how workers are classified.  It used to be easy to get a full time job just about anywhere even retail positions like Home Depot, Sears, Kmart, Walmart etc.

The old school of thought was you had your full time employees then part time employment was there mostly to make up for the gaps in scheduling or during the extra busy part of the day, event or time of the year. This changed with two large contributing factors:

1) The economic recession that the United States has been going through since 2007.

2) The Affordable Care Act.

Most businesses were trying to stay afloat by staying competitive. The budget had to be stretched just like our wages for the cost of basic goods and services. The growing trend is that the budget can be reduced on labor by not really having Full Time employees. Full Time employees are expected to have benefit packages that include health insurance, retirement contributions, etc.  In the beginning of the recession full time was anything over 36 hours so it wasn’t terribly uncommon to have employees up to 34-35 hours a week. Many employers started creating firm punishable weekly caps on hours worked. Generally these caps were at 30 hours or some number that is well under the generally accepted 40 hours per work week to be full time.

The Affordable Health Care act helped set the precedent of what is considered to be full time for health benefits at 30 hours a week. This has created the line to be drawn in the sand where employers are now setting the caps at 29 hours a week. Hopefully this trend will start to turn around soon now that the H.R.2575 – Save American Workers Act of 2014 has finally passed Congress. This if eventually passed through the Senate and finally approved by the President would eliminate the verbiage that says 30 hours is full time.

I wouldn’t hold my breath while working my part time job as it took about a year for this to finally make its way through congress.

Happy Second Job Hunting!