Retailers Slash Work Hours Rapidly Ahead Of ObamaCare

Retailers are cutting worker hours at a rate not seen in more than three decades — a sudden shift that can only be explained by the onset of ObamaCare's employer mandates.

Nonsupervisory employees logged an average 30.0 hours per week in April, the shortest retail workweek since early 2010, Labor Department data out Friday show.

Even as retail payrolls have kept rising, with rank-and-file employment up 132,000, or 1%, over the past year, aggregate hours worked have fallen 0.9% over that span.

The average retail workweek was 2% shorter in April than a year earlier, the steepest sustained decline since 1980, an IBD analysis found.

The retail workweek recovered steadily as the job market strengthened from the start of 2010 until the spring of 2012. Since then, it has been all downhill, with the apparent pace of decline accelerating in recent months.

This reversal doesn't appear related to the economy, which has been consistently mediocre. Instead, all evidence points to the coming launch of ObamaCare, which the retail industry has warned would cause just such a result.

The Labor Department also reported last week that total employee benefits in service occupations fell 0.3% in Q1, the first decline in more than a decade of data.

This could reflect a shift to part-time work and decisions to no longer provide health benefits to part-time workers, which are both ways to shift more of ObamaCare's costs to the government.

April's employment report also included other possible evidence of ObamaCare's impact, though it's premature to conclude how strong those effects will be.

Temporary jobs rose by 30,800 in April and 83,800 over the last three months. Staffing firms are expected to benefit as companies look for ways to minimize the cost of complying with ObamaCare.

It's also worth noting that overall private-sector employment has grown 75% faster than aggregate hours worked so far this year. If job growth had only kept pace with total hours over the past four months, then the U.S. would have added just 463,000 private nonfarm jobs vs. the actual 813,000.

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StillBallin75 said:

"a sudden shift that can only be explained by the onset of ObamaCare's employer mandates."

Really. As an hourly retail worker I can tell you that my hours or lack thereof are generally due to slack demand - due to the sequester, for example. I had a lady - a DoD civilian employee - walk into the store a couple weeks back looking to buy an antenna because she was cancelling her cable due to being imminently furloughed. I'm not going to argue that Obamacare will impose costs on firms. But where there's business to be had, workers will work. When there's less business, they won't.

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Senator Jeanne Shaheen, Democrat of New Hampshire, who is up for re-election next year, said, “We are hearing from a lot of small businesses in New Hampshire that do not know how to comply with the law.”

In addition, Mrs. Shaheen said, “restaurants that employ people for about 30 hours a week are trying to figure out whether it would be in their interest to reduce the hours” of those workers, so the restaurants could avoid the law’s requirement to offer health coverage to full-time employees.

The White House officials “acknowledged that these are real concerns, and that we’ve got to do more to address them,” Mrs. Shaheen said.

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sangha said:

Retailers, and every business that could find a way to do it, have been cutting the hours of full timers for many years. Now, they just have a good excuse to do what they've been doing for years.

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