Part-Time Is the New Full-Time

America's Part-Time Recovery, in which the regular jobs that were vaporized in the Great Recession are replaced with shitty part-time jobs, is working out beautifully for the noble job creators. Thanks to a combination of high unemployment, the looming Obamacare law, and greed, it appears that for many workers, part-time status is the new normal.

The WSJ today is the latest to look at the part-timing trend in the restaurant industry, which has been building ever since it became clear to employers that they might be able to avoid paying employee health care costs simply but cutting hours. The unusually high unemployment rate that's persisted for the past several years makes this easy, by providing restaurants with a large pool of desperate people willing to take whatever they can get.

Obamacare's mandates were recently pushed back for a year to give businesses time to prepare, but that doesn't change the simple calculation for business owners: 50 employees working 30 hours or more a week= mandatory insurance by employers. Business owners are naturally seeking to escape this burden. Thankfully, there are consultants to help them carry out their patriotic duty of paying as little as possible to their employees:

Employers also are also considering workarounds. Mark Lettelleir, chief executive of M.B.A. Inc., a human-resources firm in St. Petersburg, Fla., is helping several different area restaurants manage their staff so they can share employees. The test program, which is expected to begin in the fourth quarter, will involve about 500 employees of both chain and local restaurants looking to retain their full-time employees without counting them as such.

Thank god America doesn't have a single-payer health care system, which would be a significant burden to HR consulting firms that specialize in fucking workers out of their health care benefits.

[WSJ. Photo: AP]