It’s finally a possibility, and seems like HN is pretty apathetic about it (e.g. this article is from 5 days ago).
Is it that we’re still not optimistic it will actually take hold?
So yeah, I'd imagine pessimism is the reason HN seems to not care about this bill.
The result was simply that many employees had their weekly hours cut to less than 30 hours.
When paying cash for an MRI is $500, and via Health Insurance it is $5,000. There are bigger issues. I used to get a weekly shot. Paid my $60 dollar co-pay. They billed insurance another $120 or so.
Eventually I asked what the cash price is. $17 dollars. Was a real WTF?! moment.
The point is that employers can and will "adjust" in the same way on this.
To pay people more, companies had to get highly creative. Lots of "perks". Company cars, hotels, etc. Insurance was one such method. Our entire Health Insurance Industry came from companies and people avoiding absurd taxes. Now things are absurd in other ways.
What I do know is that these days you'd be very hard pressed to find a job that pays less than "what a skilled tradesman makes at their first job that's better than entry level" that doesn't also cap you at 30hr whereas that wasn't the case before. So now everyone who had a poorly paid job before now has two of them.
Accountants, administrative assistants, maintenance people, custodians, delivery drivers, CNAs, etc, etc, have had their hours cut to avoid paying benefits.
I too would be interested in numbers. If there is any improvement it seems to be confined to some industry I am completely unaware of.
As with the existing 40-hour overtime rule, it would apply to non-exempt non-union-contract workers regardless of hourly or salary pay basis; unlike the 40-hour rule it would apply only to large employers.
this allows more employees to hit "full time" status and thus be eligible for benefits. of course mega corps are simply going to re-organize their benefits package to cut out the marginal increase in healthcare and labor costs somehow. those who were scheduled 35h to stay below the cutoff will now only have work for 30h.
the "more true" solution, IMO, is decoupling healthcare and other benefits from employment rather than trying to band-aid the symptoms of this poor system with Sisyphean policy like this.
Not directly, it doesn't. The full time for mandatory benefits (30 hours) is not changed by the threshold for mandatory overtime dropping from 40 hours to 32 hours.
(Of course, if an employer wants to avoid overtime and has the same number of hours of work, but otherwise minimizes headcount, it will need 25% more 32-hour workers qualifying for benefits than it had 40-hour workers qualified for benefits, so it will mean more total workers getting benefits.)