karen gringhuis on sun 2 mar 03
Asking John Rogers -
>$15080/year. Would be tough to live on. If health,
dental, and glasses insurance was included the
position MIGHT begin to have some merit, but just
barely. I note the hours make it just shy of full
time employment, which makes it possible to avoid all
those extras that most full time employees are
entitled to under the law.<
"Tough to live on" agreed but "entitled to under the
law" - LAW??!! Exactly which law do you have in
mind?
=====
Karen Gringhuis
KG Pottery
Box 607 Alfred NY 14802
__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Tax Center - forms, calculators, tips, more
http://taxes.yahoo.com/
Marcia Selsor on mon 3 mar 03
Coming from the world of administrative abuse i.e. academia...
I think administrations think that offering minuscule salaries with zero
benefits like dental, health, vision, retirement, etc.
is ok because the part time person can use the facilities (YEEHAW!!!)
which they also must repair and maintain to teach with most likely for
over crowded classes..
probably with no budget to do so. But that is how they see it.Forgive my
jaded viewpoint.
Our campus offers $1575/semester. Our neighboring private college offers
$1300/semester. Rational being that the employee gets the use and free
energy for firing work in the college equipment which is dependent on
maintenance of the employee.
vicious circle.
Marcia Selsor
Prof. Emerita and happy to be FREE at last!
--
Tuscany in 2003
http://home.attbi.com/~m.selsor/Tuscany2003.html
Snail Scott on mon 3 mar 03
At 04:32 PM 3/2/03 -0800, you wrote:
>I note the hours make it just shy of full
>time employment, which makes it possible to avoid all
>those extras that most full time employees are
>entitled to under the law.<
>
>"Tough to live on" agreed but "entitled to under the
>law" - LAW??!! Exactly which law do you have in
>mind?
In the US, there are such laws. They require employers
to provide specific benefits (such as health insurance)
to all full-time employees. These benefits can add
substantially to the cost of having employees. It costs
an employer much, much more to hire one 40-hour-per-week
person than to hire two people for 20, or even 30, hours
per week. The government intended for these mandatory
benefits to better the lot of all working people. Instead,
it has driven many marginally-profitable small businesses
to hire few full-time employees, or none at all. Large,
profitable companies have also perceived the cost savings
of replacing full-time staff with multiple part-timers,
making it more difficult than ever to find full-time
employment at any pay rate. So, instead of gaining by
the government's well-intentioned laws most of us have
suffered for it, achieving not added benefits, but a
reduction in work hours with no benefits at all, instead.
The Atlanta position is just one of a growing number of
jobs which reap the result of employers who decide that
if the job can be done in under 35 hours a week instead
of 40, they can save far more than just 5 hours of hourly
pay; they save hundreds of dollars a month by not paying
legally-mandated full-time benefits.
-Snail
Cindi Anderson on tue 4 mar 03
This is a totally untrue statement. There is no law requiring employers to
give health insurance to employees. Unions do require them to be give to
their workers. But the rest of businesses provide them because they want
to, because it helps them attract employees. Sometimes it is because the
owners want health insurance, and in order to get a group plan you usually
have to insure a certain percentage of your workforce (2/3 for example).
The company gets to decide when it sets up a plan whether to include part
time workers in their health plan. Then on top of that, the company has
leeway in how much of the premium it wants to pay for the employee. When we
got our plan for example, we had to pay at least $100 per month for each
employee in order to be eligible for group health insurance with that
particular company. But we could also choose to pay more: 50% or 100% or
whatever % of the premium we wanted. Actually $100 a month is a very small
price compared to all the rest of the things that you have to pay whether an
employee is full or part time. Workers comp, FICA, medicare, federal and
state unemployment, and employment training tax are all based on a % of
income. It doesn't matter if you pay 10 people $100 or 1 person $1000. In
fact, you usually pay less to have one employee because some of those
payments have caps.
So, bottom line is that if there are companies that are employing part time
workers on purpose to avoid paying their health insurance, it probably means
that the companies want to pay 100% (or a high %) of the premiums for some
workers, but don't want to pay that same amount for other workers. Or that
they want to avoid the minimum $ per month. It is hard to believe $100 per
month would break any company (especially knowing that your employees are
uninsured) but maybe if you have thousands of employees it adds up.
I am in California and it is possible other states have other laws that are
different, but given that we pay a lot for just about every other thing that
exists, it would surprise me if we were not the most stringent.
(It may be helpful to put numbers on to see the relative costs. All those
other taxes/mandatory insurances listed above are about 25% of salary. So
25% of $10 an hour * 30 a week * 4.2 weeks a month = $315 a month. And the
employers portion of health insurance could be $100 a month if they set up
their plan that way.)
By the way, having hired dozens of people in my career (most of it in
corporations where I didn't care at all whether they were given benefits), I
often hired part time people. It wasn't to cheat them out of insurance, it
is just because I didn't have enough work for a full time person. Sometimes
that was over optimistic... I think companies have a tendency to over
optimistic... to think they can get by with only a part time person. It was
more to save salary dollars than benefit dollars.
Cindi
----- Original Message ----- >
> In the US, there are such laws. They require employers
> to provide specific benefits (such as health insurance)
> to all full-time employees. These benefits can add
> substantially to the cost of having employees. It costs
> an employer much, much more to hire one 40-hour-per-week
> person than to hire two people for 20, or even 30, hours
> per week.
John Rodgers on tue 4 mar 03
OK, I erred!
But it was worth it. Created a good discussion.
John Rodgers
Birmingham, AL
karen gringhuis wrote:
>Asking John Rogers -
>
>
>
>>$15080/year. Would be tough to live on. If health,
>>
>>
>dental, and glasses insurance was included the
>position MIGHT begin to have some merit, but just
>barely. I note the hours make it just shy of full
>time employment, which makes it possible to avoid all
>those extras that most full time employees are
>entitled to under the law.<
>
>"Tough to live on" agreed but "entitled to under the
>law" - LAW??!! Exactly which law do you have in
>mind?
>
>
>
>
>=====
>Karen Gringhuis
>KG Pottery
>Box 607 Alfred NY 14802
>
>__________________________________________________
>Do you Yahoo!?
>Yahoo! Tax Center - forms, calculators, tips, more
>http://taxes.yahoo.com/
>
>______________________________________________________________________________
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