On the surface, weekly or monthly job numbers depict an economy that is slowly — very slowly — but surely rebounding in terms of overall employment. However, once you peel back the first few layers, you quickly realize that the majority of the jobs gained each month are, for the most part, for part-time positions. These jobs rarely guarantee more than minimum wage and the prospect of benefits without an easy route, as in the case of large companies like Wal-Mart or Amazon subsidiaries that thrive through the use of a large pool of part-time workers.
A new report from the Wall Street Journal shows that America's restaurant owners aren't far behind. Due to the Affordable Care Act, known by its detractors as Obamacare, employers will need to offer health insurance coverage to those who work over 30 hours per week starting in 2015. An increasingly more common practice described by the Journal involves a big increase in part-time hires to effectively spread the work around, allowing managers to schedule people for 15-20 hours while still ensuring an operational restaurant.
The Obama administration ostensibly sough to curtail these activities by extending the reporting deadline – a key component for the penalty/tax structure of Obamacare – in hopes that employers who go back to hiring full-time workers. In an interview, however, a Subway owner contended that the change would do little to persuade him to do otherwise.
"Does the delay change anything for us? Absolutely not," Ken Adams, who owns 10 Subways in Michigan, told the source. "We won't start hiring full-time people."
These developments highlight the continuing deterioration of the U.S. economy. As such, independently minded investors need to do all that's possible to protect themselves from potential volatility and losses, including methods like purchasing cash flow real estate or utilizing automated trading software. Learn more by exploring GreatWealthStrategies.com further today.