Okay, here’s one of those “a new study shows” articles that shows nothing new at all…
Study Finds Employers Are Hiring More Freelancers To Avoid Obamacare
Obamacare was only imposed on us in 2010 and I haven’t had a “real” job in that time, so I don’t know what effect it has had on employment. At a guess, though, it’s been devastating for people on the fringes. It was well on the way to devastated when I left Socal, and largely because of health care costs. By the turn of the century I couldn’t beg or buy a regular job with benefits, and sometimes had to travel considerable distances to get a good long-term contract job. Employers I knew personally spent a lot of time in anguish over the cost of medical insurance, trying to keep the doors open without driving their regular workers into mutiny with insurance plan cuts. Personally, I’ve thought for a long time that group insurance as an employment benefit is the worst thing that could have happened to the whole health care industry.
All this is just life in these here United States, nothing to bitch about particularly. But having been in a position to wonder – for years at a time – whether I was going to have a roof over my head next month – and with the answer sometimes being “no” – I found this bit of reality-warping really angering…
“The trend of companies hiring more freelancers will continue annually, causing for an even more blended workforce, and creating new challenges for business leaders,” Dan Schawbel, a Partner & Research Director at Future Workplace, said in a statement provided to The Daily Caller News Foundation. “The workforce is willing to make sacrifices, including compensation and benefits, in order to gain the freedom and flexibility afforded to the freelance career path.”
You can’t see me through this laptop screen (can you?) but I’m struggling for words at this time. Pasting that paragraph into the text window made me angry all over again.
Okay, sorry, I must emote: No, you lying piece of shit, “the workforce” is not willing to make sacrifices “in order to gain the freedom and flexibility afforded to the freelance.” “The workforce” is willing to make sacrifices to avoid the freedom and flexibility of chronic unemployment.
I could go on in that vein for 5000 words or so without seriously repeating myself, but I’ll shut up now.
Long before Obamacare, employers were hiring freelancers and part-timers to pad their own bottom lines at the expense of their employees. Long after Obamacare is a memory, it will still be happening.
I suspect the difference between ‘trying to keep the doors open’ and ‘padding their bottom lines’ is largely a matter of whose ox is being gored.
Pretty much.
I’m currently temping, for lack of stable employment in this part of the country, and the temp service made me sign a paper saying I already had health insurance bought out of my own pocket before they’d hire me. It is a lie, of course, but I didn’t have $3500/year to pay for even the cheapest, most risible of the “Bronze Plans.” I don’t need and can’t afford “health insurance” with a $6500 deductible and a tiny, shrinking list of doctors and hospitals that will accept it. I still don’t have that kind of money to throw away on “insurance” that buys me basically nothing, and–since I’m temping–any day I could go to work and have my supervisor say “Oopsie, don’t clock in. We’ve got something to tell you…” It’s happened to me enough times since 2007. I don’t dare spend a dime on anything other than food, rent, or car repair bills.
Yeah, ben, you tell those stupid, greedy business owners!
Every one of whom that I know has been pretty damn nervous looking since 2008 or so. Must be because they can’t soak their employees for enough I’ll gotten profits, right comrade?
Or maybe it’s because the business climate is shit right now and they’re nervous they won’t be able to provide any jobs for anyone, including themselves and their contract workers.
But that would assume that they might be decent human beings who worry about more than “padding” the bottom line, so we know that’s bullshit, right?
Well, Goober, the ones I know are building new mansions and taking really nice vacations to exotic locales. Yeah. A lot of nice business owners out there. Also a lot who have never heard of “profit sharing,” which would increase productivity a lot. Kind of reminiscent of the Laffer Curve for the free market.