At a Wednesday hearing of the House small business subcommittee, ABC News reports, cited data and private surveys on the effect of Obamacare on hiring by mid-sized and small businesses.
Keating said those all showed that costs and incentives under the law known as Obamacare push many small and mid-size businesses toward cutting back on numbers of workers or number of hours.
“In the end, it’s clear that Obamacare serves as a very real drag on economic and employment growth,” he said.
Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research Businesses and a defender of Obamacare, said people “are being fed fears” about the law
Businesses that don’t comply with the law have to pay a penalty, which Baker said might be an incentive for some to cut work hours below 30 for part-time employees. But government data from January through June, when businesses would have been positioning themselves for the law’s launch, did not show that happening, he said.
Baker is wrong. That is precisely what Bureau of Labor Statistics data for the January to June data do show. As Andrew Puzder has just pointed out in the Wall Street Journal,
To understand ObamaCare’s impact on part-time employment, consider the six-month period between the employer mandate’s initial “look back” date of Jan. 1 and July 2, 2013, when the administration wisely announced it was delaying the employer mandate for a year. This is the period during which employers most significantly increased part-time employment in reaction to ObamaCare.
The health-care law’s actual consequences unequivocally appear in the jobs data for this period. Between Jan. 1 and June 30, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the economy added 833,000 part-time jobs and lost 97,000 full-time jobs, for net creation of 736,000 jobs. In reality, the economy overall added no full-time jobs. Rather, it lost them.
It’s not like this six-month boom in part-time jobs went unnoticed. In July, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke questioned whether the official unemployment rate fairly represented the state of the labor market because it didn’t reflect factors such as “underemployment, part-time work.” Also in July, three powerful unions wrote to the Obama administration complaining that ObamaCare would “destroy the foundation of the 40-hour work week that is the backbone of the American middle class.”
In August, Keith Hall, who ran the Bureau of Labor Statistics from 2008-12, looked at part-time hiring from the end of January through July and told a McClatchy reporter that the results were “really remarkable” and “a really high number for a six-month period. I’m not sure that has ever happened over six months before.”
This debate need not be theoretical, limited to the predicted effects of impediments and incentives. There is an abundance of actual data available, and more of it every day. Investors Business Daily has been publishing a frequently updated list of selected employers, public and private, that have announced cut-backs in hiring or moving workers to part time status as a result of Obamacare. As Of Oct. 9, the list contained 331 employers.
Some Obamanaut (Obamanut?) true believers continue to doubt that Obamacare is playing any role in limiting employment, preferring to believe that evil corporations are simply using it as an excuse to repress their workers even more. For their benefit IBD provides links to evidence each employer’s inclusion on its. Here, for example, is some of the evidence cited for Beall’s Department Stores, whose part-time workers “make up 60% of the company’s 11,000-person workforce.” Take a look and see if you think Arne Lemke, director of payroll and benefits for Bealls, is lying and hence whether IBD was justified in including Beall’s on its list.
