We Need More Hours: What Obamacare is Doing to Part-Time Workers

By Emily Smith on March 21, 2013

Part-time employees around the nation are becoming very disgruntled about the fact that they are no longer allowed to work over twenty-five hours a week. As a part-time employee myself, I can understand their feelings. I work in the restaurant business and I have witnessed many of my co-workers quit because of the new limitations. The servers only make a little over $2 an hour. Most of their money comes from tips and the more hours they work, the more tips they can get. However, with their hours cut, they can no longer make the money they need to make.

This is all due to Obamacare. It says that if an employer has full-time employees, than they must offer benefits or pay a $2000 fine for each full-time employee at the end of the year. Many restaurants do not want to do that. Just recently, my employers hired many new employees and I went from having 20 hours a week to having around 11 hours a week. It caused a drastic change in my paycheck. I’m still a student, I live on campus, and my grandparents take care of all my bills (at the moment) so it’s not like I need the hours, but what if I did? What if up until that point I was barely scraping by with my 20 hours and then they cut it down to 11? I would have been in some serious trouble and I am sure that is the situation a lot of my co-workers are in now.

I have watched servers get cut in the middle of a shift because they had reached their twenty-five hours and could no longer continue to work. Honestly, it is a little bit ridiculous that they have cut back so many hours. Many of the restaurant employees are paying their own way through college and desperately need those hours to stay afloat. All I can say is: Thanks Obama.

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