ObamaCare Employer Mandate Hit-List Grows To 429

The hits keep on coming — to the work hours of special education aides, school bus drivers, cafeteria workers, custodians, home-care workers, adjunct faculty and college students.

With this week's addition of 28 documented examples of employers cutting work hours to dodge fines levied under ObamaCare's employer insurance mandate, IBD's list now includes 429 employers.

(The ObamaCare Employer Mandate List, substantiated with links to news sources and public documents, is available for downloading at Investors.com.)

Among the new additions are seven school districts, bringing the total to 130 districts where hours have been cut or permanent staff outsourced to avoid taking on new costs for employees who work at least 30 hours a week — considered full time under ObamaCare.

In May, Oklahoma's Sweetwater County School District #1 said it would cut hours for more than 250 part-time and substitute employees to avoid as much as $2.7 million a year in added health insurance costs.

This month, the small Cass City Public Schools system in rural Michigan cut hours for 20 bus drivers and paraprofessionals to avoid up to $120,000 in extra insurance costs. One proposed way of coping with fewer transit hours: providing only one-way bus service for coaches and teams traveling to athletic events.

In February, Indiana's South Madison Community Schools cut hours for 130 bus drivers, cafeteria workers, instructional aides and custodians to avoid up to $1.2 million in insurance costs .

Other new additions involve cuts to the hours of college students, adjunct faculty or both at Kansas University, Mississippi State University, the Technical College System of Georgia, Colorado Mountain College and South Dakota State University.

IBD's list of ObamaCare job and hours cuts is dominated by public-sector employers, but that undoubtedly reflects their relative transparency about work policies, some of which come up for votes before school boards or county commissions.

Bureau of Labor Statistics data show that the workweek has also been depressed for modest-wage workers in the private sector, and the evidence points to ObamaCare's mandate as an important factor.

One way to test for an ObamaCare effect on the workweek — suggested by White House economists, no less — is to look at whether there is a shift in the ratio of workers clocking 31 to 34 hours per week compared to those working 25 to 29 hours.

If that ratio were stable or rising, it would be a sign that ObamaCare wasn't affecting work hours in a meaningful way, the White House has suggested. But the data signal the opposite: The ratio has plunged to the lowest level in almost 14 years.

Growing Shorter Weeks

The number of workers usually clocking 31 to 34 hours in their primary job has shrunk by 157,000, or 6.4%, since the fourth quarter of 2012. Meanwhile, the number of 25- to 29-hour workers has surged by 375,000, or 10.8%.

These Current Population Survey data tell a story similar to the BLS industry data. In private industries where pay averages up to about $14.50 an hour, nonsupervisors clocked, on average, just below 27.5 hours per week in April — right near the record-short workweek set last July as the employer mandate was delayed until 2015. (Readings over the stormy winter plumbed new depths, but didn't signal much.) Early this year, the Obama administration kicked the can another year for firms with fewer than 100 full-time-equivalent workers.

IBD's Employer Mandate List also helps connect the dots between the depressed low-wage workweek and ObamaCare.

Entire Industry Cuts Hours

Consider, for example, the industry that provides in-home care to the elderly and disabled. BLS data show that the average workweek in this sector shrank from 28 hours at the start of 2013 to 26.9 hours in April.

IBD's list now includes five such companies with the addition of a Home Instead Senior Care franchise, which is cutting hours for 30 to 40 workers.

Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., and Rep. Luke Messer, R-Ind., have both proposed bills that would exempt public school districts and colleges from the employer mandate.

IBD hasn't added to the list school districts where only substitute teachers are affected, or else the list could have hundreds of more entries, since that has become so commonplace.

While modest-wage workers are feeling the brunt of the mandate in the form of lost work hours, the University of South Carolina opted to protect its workers — but at the cost of its students.

Rather than cutting work hours for its adjunct faculty, the university said that an extra $4.5 million in costs due to ObamaCare will lead to a bigger tuition hike than otherwise.