The ACA defines "full-time" employment as working an average of 30 hours per week. Larger employers not offering health insurance coverage for full-time workers are assessed a fee to help finance federal subsidies that eligible workers could receive when enrolling in individual insurance exchanges . First, the universe of workers vulnerable to having hours cut back due to the incentives of the mandate would have to be significant, in the aggregate or by industry. Second, there would be a clear decrease in average hours worked per week at the time of implementation that is not accounted for by overall economic conditions. Third, there would be a greater cluster of workers appearing at or near 29 hours per week.
Fourth, there would be a shift in the composition of net job growth, toward involuntary part-time work and away from full-time work. Clearly part-time employment, especially involuntary part-time employment, has various adverse consequences. Related to assurance of parity in pay benefits are policies that set minimum and maximum work hours that jobs must offer. Some countries require that part-time workers get a minimum of work hours.
In Algeria, part-timers must receive not less than half of the statutory working time. Denmark allows collective agreements to prescribe a minimum of 15 hours per week for part-time work. France provides a minimum target of 24 hours per week for part-time workers.
Some countries also have maximum thresholds for part-timers—such as not to exceed 30 hours per week or 120 hours per month—which may prevent "involuntary full-time" working, i.e., unwelcome additional hours. Overtime is sometimes outright prohibited for part-time workers , or allowed only in emergency cases . In South Korea it is allowed but requires the agreement of the part-time worker, cannot exceed 12 extra hours per week, and comes with a pay premium for work beyond the normal work hours of full-time employees. Finally, some laws aim to facilitate the transfer from full-time to part-time work and vice versa.
In Romania, employers must, as much as possible, take into account the demands of their employees to be transferred either from full-time to part-time work or vice versa. The biggest disadvantage that part-time workers face is their relatively lower rates of pay and their benefit coverage. Prior research shows that the part-time wage penalty (the percent less in hourly wages that part-timers make relative to similar full-timers) is 19 percent for men and 9 percent for women. Part-time jobs, particularly those with the fewest weekly hours, also provide relatively less access to benefit coverage. Part-timers have only one-third the access to health insurance coverage as do full-timers—22 percent compared with 73 percent. Second, employees can be disqualified from benefits in many states if they seek only part-time work, even if their qualifying employment and earnings came exclusively from part-time work.
The UI Modernization Act gave grants to states to encourage them to allow otherwise monetarily eligible claimants with a part-time work history to search and be available only for part-time work. Nonetheless, as many as 21 states still require UI claimants to search for a full-time job. Eligibility for UI should be extended to more part-time workers and, indeed, to anyone who wants to reduce his or her work schedule for compelling reasons, including personal health and child care responsibilities.
The federal government should enact a minimum standard in which workers qualify for UI benefits as long as the work being sought is for at least 20 hours per week . In 2015, Rutgers University published a survey of almost 1,000 part-time workers .43 Among other things, it provides useful information on the economic hardships of part-time workers, and involuntary part-time workers in particular. Part-time workers were considered "involuntary" if they answered "yes" to the question, "Do you want a full-time job—35 hours a week at one place? The suggestion that the "shared responsibility provision" of the Affordable Care Act is behind some of the shift toward part-time work is not supported by the data.
The provision requires that certain employers pay a fee if they don't offer a minimum level of health insurance to employees working 30 or more weekly hours. When people in the U.S. talk about benefits, health insurance is usually top of mind. While some employers do offer health insurance to some or all part-time employees, many do not. So even if your employer considers you a part-time employee because you work less than 40 hours a week, you may still be legally entitled to health insurance coverage. But because "there is no legal definition provided by the Department of Labor for full-time or part-time employment," Reynolds says, each organization will generally set their own.
In Muse career coach Jennifer Sukola's experience, people with part time jobs typically work 15 to 29 hours a week. However, some employers will consider anyone working less than 40 hours a week a part-time employee. Zukin and Van Horn advocate for an overtime pay premium for part-time employees that kicks in at relatively fewer hours per week than for full-timers, e.g., at over 35 hours per week, which would further redistribute hours toward the underemployed. A study by Graham-Squire and Jacobs quantifies how many workers are exposed to the risk that their employers, looking to evade the ACA employer mandate, would reduce workers' hours because they could relatively easily reduce these hours. According to the study this universe includes only workers at large firms that do not currently offer health insurance.
Moreover, they are concentrated in a few industries—retail, restaurants, accommodations, and health care. Thus, Graham-Squire and Jacobs show that the empirical bite of the ACA provisions on involuntary part-time work is likely to be small. Part-time employment in Australia involves a comprehensive framework. Part-time employees work fewer hours than their full-time counterparts within a specific industry.
Part-time employees within Australia are legally entitled to paid annual leave, sick leave, and having maternity leave etc. except it is covered on a 'pro-rata' basis depending on the hours worked each week. Furthermore, as a part-time employee is guaranteed a ular roster within a workplace, they are given an annular salary paid each week, fortnight, or month. Employers within Australia are obliged to provide minimum notice requirements for termination, redundancy and change of rostered hours in relation to part-time workers. As of January 2010, the number of part-time workers within Australia was approximately 3.3 million out of the 10.9 million individuals within the Australian workforce. The most common benefits include health insurance, as well as dental, vision, and life insurance. Employers that offer insurance will usually pay for some (or even all!) of the monthly cost of the policy.
Most full-time employees will also be eligible for paid time off through federal holidays, vacation days, and sick days. Some employers offer their full-time employee's retirement options such as a 401 plan , as well as other company-specific perks such as reimbursements for childcare, a fitness membership, an education stipend and stock options. For many office-based part-time jobs, employees will have a set schedule where they work the same hours every week, Reynolds says. However, these hours may vary by season or based on certain company needs like large projects and events. Outside of office work, part-time employees may be more subject to fluctuating hours and shifts.
Depending on the company and position, part-time employees might have some say and/or flexibility in setting their weekly schedules, which is ideal for workers with responsibilities outside of work such as school, caretaking duties, or another job. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act delimits full-time employment at 30 hours, with employers required to pay a per-full-time-employee fee if they don't offer a minimum level of health insurance. The fee could occur at steps rather than a cliff and be prorated, so that the fee gets higher the more hours the employee works.
This could discourage even the small effects on the level of involuntary part-time working that some have attributed to the ACA. Alternatively, the subsidies to workers could be reduced as the hours level rises, to counter the incentives indicated by Mulligan . Alternatively, the pay "penalties" for each could be set at $1,500, $2,000, and $2,500, respectively. Thus, while adding some complexity, gradually stepping the penalty from 20 to 25, to 30, to 35 hours might avert most of any unintended side effects.
In San Jose, the "Opportunity to Work Ordinance" was approved in April 2016 to be included by the city clerk as a November 2016 ballot measure. If passed, it would require San Jose employers to offer newly available working hours to qualified part-time employees before hiring more part-time staff or temporary employees. The employer would be free to set as short a time period as it prefers between announcing the availability of hours and making a new hire. Although San Francisco, Seattle, and SeaTac, Washington, have adopted similar ordinances, the San Jose initiative would be the first measure of its kind in the country to apply acrossallindustries.
The proposal was partly in response to survey findings that about 162,000 people employed in hourly jobs in San Jose have part-time or variable schedules at their main job, increasing from 26 percent in 2006 to 43 percent today . For the entitlement to annual paid leave, countries have instituted various formulas. Japan for example has a threshold of 30 hours per week entitling the employee to the same amount of annual leave as full-time workers, plus a minimum number of days of leave for those who work less than 30 hours per week. Others, such as Brazil, specify the number of days of leave to which part-time employees are entitled according to the number of hours they work per week. In France, the same rules are used to calculate holiday pay for both part-time and full-time workers.
Some countries require a minimum number of work hours to qualify for retirement pension contributions also received by full-timers, as in Ireland. In South Africa, employees who work less than 24 hours per month for an employer are not covered by the majority of their law's working-time provisions. Under health care reform in Hawaii, employers must offer health insurance to employees who work more than 20 hours per week. Although more inclusive than the ACA, the Hawaii law was found to have led to an increase in the share of workers working fewer than 20 hours by only 1.4 percent. Indeed, the Massachusetts law, with a much smaller per employee fee ($295) than the ACA, had no discernable effects on either average hours or part-time working .
Typically in Canada, part-time employees don't qualify for health, insurance or company retirement benefits. If you're working a part-time position and a full-time job, then you are likely covered with your full-time company. However, if you only work part-time, then you can ask your employer about eligibility for healthcare and life insurance or any retirement benefits that may be available. In Canada, all employers must pay into Employment Insurance and the Canada Pension Plan . These deductions come off of an employee's paycheque and submitted on your behalf.
However, additional benefits are not guaranteed for part-time workers. Much like the number of hours you'll work in a part-time job, the benefits you'll be eligible for will depend on where you work. Many companies choose to only offer benefits—such as dental insurance or a childcare allowance—to full-time employees.
Others choose to offer some or all of their benefits to part-time workers as well. A few of the benefits commonly offered to part-time employees are paid holidays, life insurance, and paid time off , Reynolds says. The Middle Class Tax Relief and Job Creation Act of 2012, which has expanded UI "work-sharing" programs to 29 states, provides another way to increase the income of involuntary part-time employees. Work sharing with STC reinforces the built-in, automatic stabilizer role of UI.
Right to request laws also typically involve a right to request shorter or part-time hours. Thus certain employees would be allowed to request both a floor and a ceiling—effectively a more stable number of weekly hours—and also block out days and times. Employers are simply required to interact with employees to determine if their requested schedule modifications are feasible, and if not, suggest an alternative. In the Rutgers University survey, median "hours a week normally work, on average" was 25 for the entire sample, 24 for voluntary part time workers, and 29 for involuntary part-time workers.
Those with one part-time job report working a median of 20 hours per week voluntarily, but 25 if involuntarily. Reported hours rose to 35 hours if one were involuntarily part-time and had more than one job and to 50 hours per week if one of those other jobs were full time . Among those involuntary workers who came into a part-time from a full-time position, 32 percent report their current employer has reduced their hours, almost double the rate of only 17 percent of voluntary part-timers who say this happened to them. Part-time jobs come with a wage disadvantage relative to full-time jobs (see Hirsch 2005; Glauber 2013).
Indeed, the most salient disadvantages faced by part-time workers are in their relatively lower rates of pay and benefit coverage. Generally, part-time jobs pay little more than half the hourly rate paid in full-time jobs . More precisely, the part-time wage penalty (the percent by which hourly part-time wages lag full-time wages) for men is between 46 and 49 percent and for women it is between 22 and 26 percent. When adjusting for differences in personal, educational, locational, industrial, and occupational characteristics of workers, the part-time wage penalty for men is 19 percent and for women, 9 percent . The part-time pay penalty is somewhat larger for those working only 1 to 20 hours per week relative to those working 21 to 34 hours.
Finally, Garrett and Kaestner (2014; 2015) also find little evidence of increasing involuntary part-time work immediately before the ACA employer mandate was implemented. They do find a significant but small increase in part-time work during 2014 relative to what would be expected at that point in the economic recovery based on prior experience . The small change identified by Garrett and Kaestner applied just as much to part-time work between 30 and 34 hours per week as it did to workers clocking in fewer than 30 hours per week. Thus, despite a timing coincidence between higher involuntary part-time employment and the appearance of the ACA, there is no evidence that employers are hiring workers for fewer than 30 hours due to the ACA employer mandate .
Finally, even though employers may have said they would hire more part-time workers, the numbers don't suggest they actually did follow through on that. The most direct evidence of employers' intentions in response to the ACA is from surveys conducted in late summer 2014 by human resource management services company ADP . About 38 percent of respondents indicated that they would be adjusting employee hours. Yet, if employers did indeed reduce hours to keep employees below the 30-hour threshold, one would expect to see an increase in part-time jobs and fewer hours worked per job. However, employment data from the ADP shows that the part-time workforce actually grew more slowly (2.7 percent) than the full-time workforce (3.8 percent) between the first quarter of 2014 and the first quarter of 2015.
In short, the evidence gleaned from asking employers about their intended behavior and from looking at their actual behavior shows little impact of the ACA. Part-time employees are typically paid on an hourly basis and must comply with company rules, policies, and obligations, such as performance goals, safety rules, and company business practices. Even so, part-time employees generally have limited or no company benefits, such as health benefits, vacation and sick time, paid holidays, and unemployment compensation, among others, unless required by state labor laws and/or company policies.
Part-time workers are disadvantaged in three ways by current unemployment insurance laws. First, because state laws require minimum earnings to qualify for benefits, many part-time employees do not earn enough to qualify. Weekly benefit amounts could be raised by states and the eligibility requirements relaxed to enable more part-time workers to qualify for benefits. The recent time series trend data examined in this report support the conclusions from the research reviewed above.
Indeed, the share of workers working part time involuntarily due to the "inability to find full time" has dropped a bit in 2014 and 2015, after remaining stubbornly high in the recovery. Moreover, the average workweek of part-time workers increased from the recovery through 2015. Thus, any effects of the ACA have been dwarfed by cyclical forces or other structural changes that appeared prior to 2014.
The share of total persons at work who were working part time involuntarily reached a high of 6.7 percent in November 2009, in contrast to peaking below 4 percent in the previous recession . Over the course of the Great Recession, the share of workers involuntarily employed part time more than doubled to 6.7 percent. If you are back to work but working less than full-time hours, you may be able to continue receiving unemployment benefits.
However, the amount you earn will affect your weekly benefit amount . If you are working with reduced hours , you are required to report your gross earnings for each week you work when you certify for benefits. Earnings include any wages from employment or payment for personal services. You can check your MiWAM account page for the reduced payment amount. On the other hand, part-time employees are usually not eligible for company-sponsored benefits such as health insurance or retirement plans.
