Pirate's Cove

Hyper-leftist Buzzfeed runs this story in their business section, as written by Sapna Maheshwari, who, like most liberals, seems shocked at The Way Business Works

Staples Threatens To Fire Staff For Working More Than 25 Hours A Week

Last year Alice*, 19, typically clocked anywhere from 25 hours to 40 hours a week at the Staples store where she works as a part-time staffer. The hours were great, she says, because she loves her co-workers and uses the job to help support her family.

She started working at Staples around the same time the office-supply chain was making headlines by forbidding its part-time employees from working more than 25 hours a week. The rules, rolled out in the lead-up to the Affordable Care Act, were seen by many staff members as an effort by the company to avoid paying benefits to “full-time” employees — classified under the law as anyone working more than 30 hours a week.

But for most of 2014, the rules didn’t really affect Alice or her colleagues, who regularly exceeded the threshold and were still considered part-time. That all changed this year, though, as the employer mandate kicked in; if Staples doesn’t pay benefits for people working more than 30 hours a week, it could face up to $3,000 in penalties per person.

Now, Alice is working far fewer hours — and if she clocks above 25, she may be fired.

“Before January, it was a smack on the wrist if anyone went over 25 hours — they got an email scolding them saying, ‘You went over 25, try not to do that,’” she told BuzzFeed News in an interview on the condition of anonymity, given she still works at the company. “But now it’s become really serious…they’ve threatened to write up managers and every person that goes up over 25 hours.”

In fact, quite a few companies do the same thing, even before the issues of Obamacare and the 30 hour classification. Two of my previous jobs at Very Big Companies had roughly 25% of their inside sales force as part timers, and have significant restrictions on the allowable hours. The first had a requirement that the part-timers did not average more than 33 hours a week over a 3 month period of time, otherwise they would be classified as full time, and significant benefits kicked in at full time hours. So, we scheduled them for no more than 25 hours, and had to keep a close eye on those hours. Write-ups could occur, and extra hours impacted the P&L. The other scheduled for 20 hours. Period. This gave them 5 hours to play with if they had to come in to do a deal. And they would literally have to hand deals as splits over if they were going to go above. And write ups kicked in immediately on a weekly basis.

Companies do his, both for cost control, because they have certain operational budgets, and second, for benefits of full time workers. Now with Ocare and the 30  hour classification, this is even more important, and, surprise!, guess who gets the pay the penalty: that’s right, the employees. Staples had the policy well before Ocare, but are now forced to stringently enforce it.