Mormon-owned DI cuts workers’ hours, avoids Obamacare rule
Published on May 28, 2013 05:11PM
As the nation anticipates further implementation in January 2014 of the Affordable Care Act, which requires companies with 50 or more employees to provide insurance for their full-time employees, LDS Church-owned Deseret Industries has cut its workers’ hours to fewer than 30. In doing so, DI, as it is known, will not have to provide health coverage for these employees.
In recent years, the DI has become one of the premier places in Utah where refugees and others can find work.
Its one-year training program allows people fleeing from any number of war-torn countries to learn the skills, including English, to find better employment. The workers are given an hourly wage, starting at $7.25 and increasing incrementally depending on quickness at sorting clothes.
But they do not get health insurance, according to LDS Church spokeswoman Ruth Todd.
Todd explained the cuts as a way "to serve as many people as possible."
Reducing the trainees’ hours, she said, "has allowed for a dramatic increase in participants."
Other large employers — public and private — have been adjusting workers’ hours in advance of the Obamacare coverage requirement.
Granite School District, for instance, will be trimming the hours for hundreds of part-time workers. Granite officials note the district has never provided health benefits for part-time hourly workers, and they deemed the price tag too steep to begin doing so.
Judi Hilman, executive director of Utah Health Policy Project, said that refugees, like all citizens, are eligible for premium tax subsidies and Medicaid, depending on their income.
But, Hilman added, "we wish large employers would not do this."
It's just good business sense and Economics 101. And that saves the most people though it often makes it tougher on them. Most of my clients are doing this. Don't blame the Church or the various companies. It's not their fault.
You're desperately trying to highlight things that have been happening for years already, and then going "AH HA, it is because of Obamacare!"
I'm convinced the companies that do this and then blame Obama are just idiots acting prematurely or they're partisans trying to make a political statement. But the fact is this isn't as widespread and attributable to Obamacare as you and FOX News would like everyone to believe.
Mormon-owned DI cuts workers’ hours, avoids Obamacare rule
Published on May 28, 2013 05:11PM
Its one-year training program allows people fleeing from any number of war-torn countries to learn the skills, including English, to find better employment. The workers are given an hourly wage, starting at $7.25 and increasing incrementally depending on quickness at sorting clothes.
But they do not get health insurance, according to LDS Church spokeswoman Ruth Todd.
Todd explained the cuts as a way "to serve as many people as possible."
Reducing the trainees’ hours, she said, "has allowed for a dramatic increase in participants."
Do the full-time trainers and managers of Deseret Industries who are not affected by these cuts get health insurance? Are managers and trainers getting their hours cut?
Why is non-profit Deseret Industries cutting the hours now, instead of closer to the end of the year?
If it is true that reducing trainee hours "has allowed for a dramatic increase in participants", wouldn't that also be the case without the Affordable Health Care Act?
"The great problem of any civilization is how to rejuvenate itself without rebarbarization." - Will Durant "We've kept more promises than we've even made" - Donald Trump "Of what meaning is the world without mind? The question cannot exist." - Edwin Land
If it is true that reducing trainee hours "has allowed for a dramatic increase in participants", wouldn't that also be the case without the Affordable Health Care Act?
It would. However these workers' salaries are essentially being cut as much as 25% or more with reduced hours. If they were paying for insurance privately, it now becomes more difficult.
Another recent study by the Employee Benefit Research Institute proves that this is a trend that has been going on for quite some time anyway.
Absolutely meaningless. What we want are factors that improve the situation, not exacerbate like Obamacare. But it is interesting to note the uptick coinciding with the Obama Administration........
I also notice the blue line dips substantially right around 2007, the very point at which the thirty-year "affordable housing" scam/bubble created by the Carter administration, intensified by the Clinton administration, and defended till the very last by deranged, power-inebriated madmen like Barney Frank in the face of mountains of empirical evidence that the system was near collapse, finally blew up in our faces and then took much of the rest of the economy with it (thanks primarily to Fanny and Freddie and their bundled mortgage-backed securities).
The rest is history. The 2007 recession became the Obama/Keynes great recession, and we are doubtless looking at at least a decade, thanks to relentlessly irrational government policies, all of which have a long history of failure prior to this recession and not a single one of which, as far as I'm aware, is in any way appropriate as a solution to the nation's economic problems, before this begins to clear.
Nothing is going to startle us more when we pass through the veil to the other side than to realize how well we know our Father [in Heaven] and how familiar his face is to us
- President Ezra Taft Benson
I am so old that I can remember when most of the people promoting race hate were white.
bcspace wrote: It's just good business sense and Economics 101.
Yes, it is all about maximizing profit and nothing to do with helping people or anything else Christlike. The whole Mormon church is likewise merely proceeding in such a way as to maximize profit. It is a business with as much heart and soul as an ATM machine. Money changers.
when believers want to give their claims more weight, they dress these claims up in scientific terms. When believers want to belittle atheism or secular humanism, they call it a "religion". -Beastie
yesterday's Mormon doctrine is today's Mormon folklore.-Buffalo
Yet another example from bc that illustrates how bad an idea it is to continue the ill-advised reliance on employers for health insurance coverage.
I totally agree. Employees should buy their insurance privately and the premiums deducted pre-tax which can actually be done now in a Cafeteria Plan if a company decides to offer that benefit. Of course one shouldn't deny a company from offering insurance plans as incentives, but neither should they be required or expected to.
Yet another example from bc that illustrates how bad an idea it is to continue the ill-advised reliance on employers for health insurance coverage.
I totally agree. Employees should buy their insurance privately and the premiums deducted pre-tax which can actually be done now in a Cafeteria Plan if a company decides to offer that benefit. Of course one shouldn't deny a company from offering insurance plans as incentives, but neither should they be required or expected to.
Making insurance premiums tax-deductible is a subsidization of insurance premiums. As we know from your body of posts, having the government subsidize health insurance premiums consists of a government takeover of the healthcare industry.
I can't believe you want the government to come in and take over 1/5th of the economy like that.
It’s relatively easy to agree that only Homo sapiens can speak about things that don’t really exist, and believe six impossible things before breakfast. You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.
Making insurance premiums tax-deductible is a subsidization of insurance premiums. As we know from your body of posts, having the government subsidize health insurance premiums consists of a government takeover of the healthcare industry.
I can't believe you want the government to come in and take over 1/5th of the economy like that.
Obamacare actually does this by forcing everyone to buy. However, allowing consumers and companies to choose a PRA is not even close.
