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America's Second-largest Employer Is a Temp Agency
cold fjord writes "From the Examiner: '...the second-largest employer in America is Kelly Services, a temporary work provider. ... part-time jobs are at an all-time high, with 28 million Americans now working part-time. ... There are now a record number of Americans with temporary jobs. Approximately 2.7 million, in fact. And the trend has been growing. ... Temp jobs made up about 10 percent of the jobs lost during the Great Recession, but now make up a tenth of the jobs in the United States. In fact, nearly one-fifth of all jobs gained since the recession ended have been temporary.' The NYT has a chart detailing the problem."
and some places make you an 1099 but boss and work you like an W2 one.
at least under the new bill part timers and temps can get real health insurance with out pre existing conditions or mini med planes that don't cover much.
...in with the sharks.
A shall-remain-unnamed agency pulled a fast one. They said, "We lost the contract" AFTER I started working; redrew it... several times during my employment... and got away with making more than 2x what I was earning. Suffice to say, I would never want to work as a temp / contracted employee for such-a-business that shall remain unnamed.
Oh, yeah; and the bozo who "lost" my contract, quit the same day he lost it, which was the day AFTER I started working.
Anyway. Don't be fooled by numbers like these. I seriously doubt an organization as large as Kelly, with it's horrible reputation, could actively employ -- and handle -- ALL of these employees. And, temp can mean anything; from one month, two weeks, a few days, six months, or a year or two. It's not steady work, and frankly, organizations like these don't really care about the employee.
If you can, ALWAYS work directly with the employer.
If ever there was a term that marks you as someone who lives on their couch and consumes carefully constructed media messages..
"Great Recession" leaves the impression the only way you can interpret current events is by franchising them out to old historic dramas.
Employers are afraid to commit and invest in their employees any more. I worked at a call center that was a "temp-to-hire" once - they had around 50 full time employees, including the 20-odd folks in management. Another 100 were temp workers who were brought in, worked to the bone until they burned out, then let go. The highest performers (read: the people who didn't screw up) were offered full time positions with the company, or promotions. The need for this could have been alleviated with better training, but training employees is expensive. Better to hire a lot of them short term through a temp agency, see which ones fit in, and just let the others go, in a constant pattern of churn.
I quit that place despite being one of the rare full timers, because I decided I'd much rather work on computers directly than just talk to people about them.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Here is our opportunity to lessen our average work week to be less than 40 hours. Now we just need our safety nets to keep up with the fact that a large percentage of the population will probably be working less than 40 hours per week in the future. In my opinion either the percentage of part time workers will continue to rise or the number of unemployed will start to rise. Hopefully we decide to fix the social problems caused by this with welfare programs instead of higher minimum wage laws this time (since small minded regulations create these problems in the first place).
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
No, they'll just all follow suit with Wal Mart and make sure nobody ever gets enough hours to tip over that threshold.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
http://www.theonion.com/articles/temp-hides-fun-fulfilling-life-from-rest-of-office,49/?ref=auto
We no longer need 40-hour work-weeks in the US. The productivity of the average worker is really damn high. But we've decided that cutting back hours to what's needed justifies a massive pay-loss.
This manifests in temp-jobs, migrant workers, bored salaried office workers dragged into offices for 40 hours a week. The net result is a less stable society, with a high GDP, and awful wages.
Please note this post represents an observational opinion that doesn't not necessarily represent a rigorously studied position, but rather an intuited one.
get rid of salary no overtime pay or make it 100K mini pay to have it like that.
also have a double OT pay kick it at 50-60 hour weeks
Maybe even make 35 the new full time with ot starting at hour 36.
Temp jobs are mainly an issue because being unemployed here sucks. If we gave everyone what we give the 1% of people in jail (food, medical coverage, shelter), being a temp employee wouldn't suck so much. If you didn't like it, you could quit without fear. That would solve the whole problem with shitty jobs (employers would have to pay you extra to be willing to do a shitty job). It would also put an end to the minimum wage issue: if they don't pay enough, you don't have to bother working.
Yes, having the 2nd largest employer in the country be a temp service speaks volumes about the alleged recovery and job market.
The first-largest is Wal Mart, which is pretty much the same, and horrible.
(2.2 million employees, 1.3 mill in the USA)
Yet curiously omitted from the figures?
Total number of US government employees? 2.8 million.
Total local/state employees? 19-some million.
So ~20 million people in this country get their paycheck from the government....that's what, about 7% of the entire electorate owes their income to the gubbermint? One might argue that due to a clear conflict of interest, they perhaps shouldn't get votes.
Some people would say that's even MORE revealing about the US (so called), not to mention the tendentiousness of the reporting on the story that it's NOT EVEN MENTIONED.
-Styopa
at least the works can get benefits on there own.
Maybe this is a good thing. Or at least, could be a good thing.
Imagine, for a metaphor, that workers are computer servers. This would be like virtualization - since the amount of work needed is often variable, being able to quickly "provision" workers could be a benefit. And having an agency that employs these people could provide more stability for the workers, in the way that Amazon and other cloud providers get more heavily-utilized servers. And, as with the computer cloud vs. dedicated server debate, employees they *need* to have, or who provide some function that interchangeable employees cannot, can be hired full-time as they currently are.
In an ideal world, these workers would get all the benefits of permanent employment (medical coverage, unemployment benefits, even regular promotions and wage increases) via the temp agency. However, in the "anything that reduces corporate profits by one iota is COMMUNISM" economy we have, something tells me this isn't the case.
Mod parent up. The intended effect was to give minimum wage employees free healthcare but the actual affect is to reduce their hours from 40 hrs a week + overtime to a strict less than 30 hours a huge paycut for a group that was living pay check to pay check as it was.
In fact, nearly one-fifth of all jobs gained since the recession ended have been temporary.'
What in the what? I'd REALLY like to see a source on that, given that it's directly contradicted by the BLS.
http://www.bls.gov/webapps/legacy/cpsatab9.htm
Since the job market bottomed, we've created 5.4 million full-time jobs and 600,000 part-time jobs. How is that "nearly one-fifth"?
Everything is better with chainsaws.
Got a temp job at Deep 13. Never again!
Well, to be honest, this is the making of (D) politics and policies. The world doesn't work like those that live in ivory towers believe. While trying to help th "little guy" by passing things like ObamaCare, have dramatically changed how the little guy is employed. No longer able to find full time work (thanks Reid/Pelosi) because employers cut back "full time" employees to part time, and from 40 Hours to 25 hours a week to avoid increases in costs due to ObamaCare.
Then all the liberals start whining about how "unfair" it is that employers try to save their businesses by not incurring new taxes (aka ObamaCare). Well who didn't see this coming? Well, Reid and Pelosi didn't. Probably, because they didn't read the bill until after it was passed. And that is what you get when you don't read something before you vote on it.
So, if you want to blame anyone, blame those that tried, and failed, to fix a problem by making it worse than it was before. Oh, and delay the implementation of ObamaCare until after the next election. If you voted for these clowns, you're getting the idocracy you so deserve.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Companies typically pay the temp agency twice what the employee's hourly wage is, so any actual saving is limited.
.
Companies shouldn't have to worry about providing insurance to workers, regardless. They should be able to focus on the cost of running their business with static expenses. Countries like Denmark has some of the highest individual entrepreneurship rates in the world. Why? Because the government takes care of providing health care to everyone, as well as all schooling through college. Obviously these are all funded through higher tax rates, but it leaves a lot of unknown headaches from businesses and manages to provide everyone an opportunity to succeed.
Agreed.
Single-payer health care would definitely be a way to fix this.
People have been predicting the wealth economy for some time, but have no clear plan on how to transition to that model.
Here's an opportunity: redefine "full time" to be less than 40 hours. Our productivity is now so high that fewer people need to work, but at the same time we need to employ everyone in order to prevent unrest and revolt.
Productivity is high, so we should have more leisure time. GDP per capita has skyrocketed, it's doubled since about 1990, and the average citizen would get $40,000 per year if output was distributed evenly. That's every man, woman and child - employed or not, and every year.
Corporations have to start spending money on the people instead of cutting people out of production. Better educated workers, happier workers, healthier workers make your business stronger and give better return on investment than rehiring. Much better return than "cost accounting", which aims to make the cheapest product people can tolerate.
Government has to start rerouting wealth from businesses to the people, by way of infrastructure benefits. Free health care and free education, as well as infrastructure projects (national system of renewable power generation, universal internet service, &c) enrich the population without coddling to the lazy.
Production is met by an ever-dwindling need for human interaction. We should embrace this trend in a way that doesn't require armed revolt.
Mod parent up. The intended effect was to give minimum wage employees free healthcare but the actual affect is to reduce their hours from 40 hrs a week + overtime to a strict less than 30 hours a huge paycut for a group that was living pay check to pay check as it was.
... which will force them to go on government assistance (thus making a large portion of our population even more beholden to Uncle Sam), which will cause many to have to voluntarily cut their hours (thanks to the ever-increasing welfare income gap), or have to forgo college so they can get a second job with which to feed their families (thereby guaranteeing their own progeny a similar life at the bottom of the fiscal ladder)...
Anyone who doesn't realize these obviously shit ideas that get voted into law are that way by design, has to have their heads encased firmly in their own rectums.
-- CanHasDIY, preserving some well deserved mods
Electronic Plantation...
If you follow the links in TFA the data quoted is from 2010.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
Doesn't double OT already kick in at 50-60? I worked at a shoe factor one summer and I thought it was hours over X or on Sundays that triggered double-OT for us.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Then all the liberals start whining about how "unfair" it is that employers try to save their businesses by not incurring new taxes
Yeah, because it's just oh so great that the businesses are "saved" by pissing on their employees and not providing them with adequate health care coverage.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
This is nothing new. Some summer jobs in the 1980's I had often limited me to 19 hours a week, because at 20 you were no longer considered part-time and thus would be eligible for benefits.
Obamacare is a Republican idea. That's the reason that it's a byzantine maze of profiteering middlemen: Republicans love their corporate welfare.
Liberals originally wanted single-payer system like that found in most civilized countries.
‘Bingo’: Iowahawk sums up the jobs report in one tweet about Taco Bell
David Burge @iowahawkblog
Unemployment report in a nutshell: the Taco Bell that had 30 40 hour workers now has 40 30 hour workers.
Behind the Dismal Jobs Numbers: The ‘New’ Economy Takes Shape
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
an IT hiring hall in needed like the other trades have. at least then the temp agency can have more of clue about IT stuff.
From this source:
Few people would willingly take a 25% paycut, even if it means fewer hours, and no executive is going to have that overhead cut into his bonus.
Support the EFF and Creative Commons. The war is coming, and they're supporting you...
We only start whining when the C-levels do stuff like give away 2 million pizzas, and then pat themselves on the back with a five million dollar bonus for a marketing job well done. All while complaining that they'll have to raise pizza prizes 14 cents if they have to pay for healthcare. Personally, I'd pay a dollar more a pizza just to be assured that the kid who was making it had gotten his case of the flu treated two weeks ago.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Now we just need our safety nets to keep up with the fact that a large percentage of the population will probably be working less than 40 hours per week in the future.
Welfare programs have to be paid for by taking money from somebody.
I know, we can take some of gains from improved productivity and automation over the last 40 years and use that to shore up social safety nets while still reducing the average work week to 30 hours!
Oh, wait, somehow every last bit of that got snorked up by capital, there's nothing left over for labor. How about "FUCK YOU" instead?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Obamacare is a Republican idea.
Yes, that's why it originated from that well-known Republican state, Massachusetts. No, wait, that's not right.
Now I know Obama wanted desperately to pin the MA health clusterfuck on Romney, but the reality is that the self-infected health care debacle MA created was thanks to their Democrat dominated legislature. The health care mandate was a last-ditch attempt to allow people to keep some degree of choice in their health care, rather than throwing everything into the control of the government.
Liberals originally wanted single-payer system like that found in most civilized countries.
Completely false. Obamacare was passed with Dems having a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and having control of the House. If they wanted single-payer, they would have made single-payer. They wanted Obamacare instead, as a hand-out to their friends in the health care industry.
So how are these folks supposed to buy all the crap these companies are trying to sell? Or have they turned their back on the US market?
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Bring in the idea of competing with more secure forms of employment and that can be made to change - where it cannot be a condition of employment to accept anything less than full-time/full-benefit work. To prevent a European-style response of stalled hiring, have the unemployed and new entrants become a protected hiring class as long as they've got less than 10 years of contiguous direct-hire (read: not with anyone like Kelly's staffing services) employment - which restarts on loss of employment.
If it's really about flexibility, then one's business model should not depend on desperate people or the circumvention of benefits - but of advantages that can compete with secure employment at any skill level. Otherwise it is about the control of desperate, disposable people - and nothing more.
Otherwise, this concept of less-secure and disposable employment needs to be killed from orbit with fire, just to be sure.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
You got what you asked for. You rammed the healthcare bill through without any republicans needed to support it (only 1 republican in both house and senate, combined, voted for the bill.. and the vote wasnt needed) so this is exactly what you wanted.
Dont like what you wanted? Maybe you should have read the bill before passing it.
"His name was James Damore."
Actually, I'd argue that not many people thought that so many employers are immoral shit-sucking assholes who'd intentionally try to screw their employees out of health care. I would never imagined that any business would publicly announce they're trying to fuck over their employees. I'm shocked, quite frankly, at hearing so many businesses declare that they are, in fact, run by immoral fucktards who not only couldn't give two shits about their employees, but actually see no problem with it.
- An employer who pays for health insurance for all of his employees
I don't respond to AC's.
America's second largest employer is Walmart, 2.2m worldwide, not all of them work in the US. For example 180,000 of them work for their Asda subsidiary in the UK. The largest employer, and indeed the largest employer in the world is the US Department of Defense[sic] which has 3.2m employees. They will be mostly Americans even if they don't work in the USA.
A single Republican in both house and senate, combined, voted the the bill.
Democrats overwhelmingly voted for it.
The Democrats wrote it.
The Democrats pushed for it.
The Democrats voted for it.
The Democrats single-handedly passed it.
Yet you are now already calling it a Republican bill, even before its been fully implemented. Seems to me that Democrats never want to take responsibility for the shit they do.
Before you go on some diatribe about the bill being similar to the one passed in Mitt Romney's State of Massachusetts, that State is damn near as Democrat as it gets. You dont get to escape responsibility by pointing out that a State notoriously run by Democrats implemented it first. The Democrats own the health care bill lock, stock, and barrel. Its all yours.
Admit that you guys fucked up really badly, or be proud of it. Dont try to blame others for the shit you did.
"His name was James Damore."
well there kicking that can down the road now being that was delayed.
Well he was just informing shareholders what was going to happen. I'm not sure I would characterize it as "complaining". So be sure to order your pizza, and recognize that the 14-15 cents is "baked in" the price. Since you have no problem with an extra $1.00, I'm not sure what the problem is.
Dark Reflection
In most countries the number of birth/1000 is decreasing and it appears to be tightly coupled with the economic state of each country. In addition, there is nothing new about humans being replaced by machines (Farmers, phone operations, lumber cutting...). It has been happening since before the 1800 yet we live hundreds of times better than they did in the 1800. Human kind has a way of making it work out. As long as we keep working on world issues we will make it.
Unfortunately for you, the Buckeye State managed to defeat a stricter-than-Walker bill and the state is still doing fine. It also helps that the Republicans here know well enough to leave labor relations issues alone lest they incur a third 1958-level event.
If you want an example of how labor and business can cooperate, Ohio would be one of the better examples. Certain must-pass bills that are considered business-friendly in other states (the ALEC-written, multiply deployed Walker bill as well as the Ohio-defeat-by-referendum-inspired RTW bill) are not necessarily considered business friendly. That, and against the trend for transplants to opt for worker-hostile states (read: the entire South), Honda chose to locate itself in Marysville.
Certainly there's plenty of pressure against the state to harmonize itself with the South, but I don't expect it to be a law-violating lockstep action.
(Before you start citing the departure of NCR as evidence of business hostility, they were already on their way out in the 1990's)
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
The democrats look out for the little guy like the chicken farmer looks out for the chicken.
He just keeps throwing out the feed so the suckers come running when it's axe time.
THL phish sticks
Yes, that's why it originated from that well-known Republican state, Massachusetts.
No, it originated with the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.
An individual mandate to purchase insurance is indeed just about the only possible way to try to awkwardly cram "free marketness" onto health insurance.
Completely false. Obamacare was passed with Dems having a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and having control of the House. If they wanted single-payer, they would have made single-payer. They wanted Obamacare instead, as a hand-out to their friends in the health care industry.
You're mistakenly conflating Democrats with Liberals. There are many Democrats in tossup districts, who probably figured it would be better to fix healthcare with Republican ideas, so as to fend off challenges by Republican rivals. What Democrats probably didn't count on was that the Republican base is so incredibly ignorant, that they could be trivially reprogrammed to think what were once their own party's market-driven, individual-responsibility policies are now radical socialist handouts to slackers.
they did jack the price up by $1 and still cut hours
I covered your whine in the second paragraph. Immoral is such a subjective term, Creating a new tax and forcing people to choose between higher costs or cutting employee's hours is immoral.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
The original version of the healthcare plan was written 15-20 years ago, including the mandate, by the Heritage Foundation, well known as a pinko-commie-lib think tank. (For the mouth-breathers out there, that's a joke). Go look for other Heritage Foundation proposals and see what you think.
So why do most of the other countries in the developed world, that do have universal health care, deliver better overall health care outcomes for 60% less (10% of GDP) than the current US system (16% of GDP)?
Let me stop you right there chief. You are sorely mistaken. About most everything you said. Much of the blueprint for Obamacare came from Romney's work in MA. Romney is a Republican, and it was very much a compromise effort.That being said, real liberals (not Obama) want health care to be a fundamental right, and single payer is the most popular method for achieving the practical side of this. Republicans want health care to be a choice, a market commodity. Obamacare was an attempt to get more people covered, and slightly widen patient rights (eg coverage for people with pre-existing conditions). Additionally, the biggest mistake you can make is to consider Dems liberals. They are centrists, with a few liberals and a good chunk of conservatives (google blue dog democrats) rounding out party composition.
There is no "decline in manufacturing"; manufacturing in the US is bigger than ever before, it's just that other sectors have grown even faster.
As for temp workers, what do you expect? The more difficult the government makes it to hire and fire workers and the more paperwork and cost is associated with hiring/firing, the more employers will simply hand off the risk of hiring to other companies. Obamacare and e-Verify will cause even more employers to rely on temp agencies.
Say "thank you" to Obama and progressivism.
What is this nonsense? Cut-throat businessmen will search out the cheapest method of attaining the labor they need. You don't have billionaire CEOs sitting around saying, "Well I really wish I could pay my employees tons of extra money, but unfortunately that Obamacare is making it unaffordable!" They pay people as little as possible because they can, and they would be doing the same thing even if healthcare reform had never been suggested.
If you want to blame anyone, blame the people who want to tax the middle class in order to provide benefits to the wealthy. Blame the people who want to give unlimited funds to the military and NSA while blocking infrastructure improvements because they believe that public investments is communistic.
Yep. Obamacare == guaranteed money for insurance companies, particularly since the "Public Option" was dropped.
Read up on the history of Medicare / Medicaid. It was spearheaded by insurance companies. Because they kept losing money on old people visiting hospitals. Easy answer = get the government to cover all of the old people for them!
Also notice that every bump on social security for "Cost of Living Adjustments" corresponds to an equal bump in the medicare / medicaid premium that comes out of it. Insurance companies have fine guaranteed revenue growth under their control right there.
Neither the liberals nor the conservatives are in charge of policy. Just follow the money.
You're conflating an idea from a Republican think tank in the late '90s with a 2000+ page bill drafted by Democrats and signed by a Democratic President.
One think tank does not speak for every Republican. And Republicans certainly do not own 2000 pages of nonsense.
Careful, the cognitive dissonance cause by the sudden introduction of "facts and figures" can be injurious to an ideologue's brain.
I like the irony. I am shocked — shocked— to find that gambling is going on in here!
Fuck the "job creators". They've had tax cuts for 10+ years now, so where are the goddamn jobs? According to conservative orthodoxy, low taxes on the rich somehow create jobs, but it sure looks like they lied to us.
Not happy with having already removed most of your rights as workers...
I completely agree. Obamacare is very business unfriendly. A Canadian style system where the employer bears no specific responsibility because healthcare is paid out of general taxes would be much more business friendly. Toyota, for one, certainly thought so when a major reason they put a plant in Canada instead of the US was Canadian healthcare. Republicans should also value maximizing the benefit for the money spent, and Canadian healthcare, which costs only 2/3 of the US, certainly qualifies as a savings.
So why aren't Republicans, with their concerns for business friendliness and cost effectiveness, pushing for Canadian style healthcare? It's an obvious win-win.
why do most of the other countries in the developed world, that do have universal health care, deliver better overall health care outcomes for 60% less
Because they pay their doctors less. When government is the primary employer or leading negotiator with physicians, they can't bargain much.
But of course doctors in those other countries do sometimes go on strike.
Healthcare got rammed through? The health care plan as written by the right wing Heritage Foundation and previously implemented in Massachusetts by Governor Romney? That Republicans stalled, limited, and forced further to the right at every opportunity just so the majority could bring it to an up or down vote?
Don't want to over extrapolate here, perfect health probably won't appear when Doctors are paid nothing.
Unfortunately, those ideas had to be included to appease Democrats from more conservative districts.
This idea that things were included to "appease districts" doesnt make sense since "we have to pass it in order to find out whats in it."
The people did not know what was in it when it was passed. Not only was no attempt made to "appease districts", there was a clear plan to intentionally keep people uninformed about it.
Clearly the Democrats were trying to appease their campaign donors, not their districts. Yes, thats the insurance companies.
"His name was James Damore."
Temp jobs made up about 10 percent of the jobs lost during the Great Recession, but now make up a tenth of the jobs in the United States.
10% = .1 = 1/10 = a tenth....
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
So, the idea is sound. They just need to revise the limit down to 5 hours a week.
Sent from my PDP-11
I've heard of places with a 3-month trial period written into the contract. If it doesn't work out at that point, either party can cancel the arrangement with no penalties.
I can actually verify this one from personal experience. I was making 15 an hour for a company. They paid the temp company 35 an hour. I saw the invoices. That was with a company called teksystems. I did temp work also for the state of illinois. I did various admin stuff there. made like 11 an hour. They paid 20 an hour for me. So yeah the AC is actually correct. The temp shit is a racket for the temp companies.
I got a TV tech support job at one place for a couple months through a temp agency. I eventually found out that the agency was taking a >20% cut of what the company was paying.
On the plus side, I got all the complicated (and thus interesting) equipment setup calls, because nobody cared how long my average call was but they came down hard if the actual employees took too long with the calls.
Bob Dole also brought it to the Senate floor. Squirm as you like, but the roots of Obamacare are firmly planted in conservative thought. I agree it's a bit of a Solomon's baby, though. Too bad there are so many people out there like you that pushed scared politicians (who just want to be re-elected, granted) away from single payer. But, as it has been pointed out, you are trivially reprogrammed, so I probably shouldn't hold you responsible.
" they want the Government to be the single payer so the bureaucratic army of paper-pushing micro-managers can verify everyone is being treated equitably. Which costs more, not less,"
Then please explain how is it that the whole of first world with the notable exception of USA has government-as-single-payer, less expenditure per citizen, better coverage and better life indexes than USA.
You would have a point if employers had to offer the choice of working directly for the same job and level of skill. Otherwise they act as employer-protecting unions that insulate from the worker.
That, and your lines look like they came straight from the ASA trade group.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Given that it lives and thrives off of desperate workers in the United States - as opposed to the ASA/pro-staffing agency talking points - it is a problem.
Once you've had good, secure employment - you wouldn't want anything less until you could afford to refuse it.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
And I hate to say it but being in the trenches i can say its true, the reason is Obamacare which i said before it passed was gonna be a disaster, and wadda ya know? it is.
What we NEEDED was a single payer option and caps on the crazy drug and insurance prices, what we GOT is practically a love letter to those same drug and insurance companies so all the businesses are just making everybody short timers. in the past few months i don't think I've had a single customer under 40 that is getting full time anymore, they ALL have been cut to less than 30. this is really hurting a lot of families and i expect to see disability and food stamp rolls explode as folks scrabble to get on the dole just to survive.
So don't buy the bullshit they are selling on the coasts folks, here in the heartland I can tell you things are pretty fucking bad. I have a feeling we are gonna be seeing a "dead kid and old folk" summer as the weaker kids drop and the old folks cook because their families can no longer pay the bill for the AC thanks to being put on short time, everything from construction to services are either letting folks go and replacing with short timers or are just making sure no employee gets above 30 but in both cases its really hurting the working poor folks, its really getting bad here in the flyover states.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Companies hire part-time workers and temps [forbes.com], avoid the onerous mandate.
Companies have been pulling this perma-temp crap since the early 90's, but suddenly it's Obamacare that's causing it?
Some parts of the health care mandate like the penalty for not covering employees has been suspended until 2015 for all businesses, but, not the individual penalty(unconstitutional, regardless of judge dickhead Roberts pinhead judgement) for not having health insurance while earning something like $30k+ income. Yeah, that's where all our life savings is going towards the fucking monopolized(thanks to government) healthcare industry where hospitals,doctors, pharmaceuticals charge you whatever the fuck they want to until they clean you out.
Ditto. I worked through Aerotek for a year (which is related to TekSystems). The company I worked for paid $55/hour for me, and I only got $25/hr from Aerotek.
(((dB)))
The bill was modified several times, in attempts to get Republicans on-board to support it, yet they still stonewalled it. It would have taken too much time and effort to completely undo the Republican damage, instead it was passed as-is, because it's an improvement, with the possibility of future laws fixing it.
You can't claim it isn't the Republicans' plan, just because they decided to pull out at the end, after negotiating the changes to it. If it was the Democratic plan, it would be single-payer, like Medicare, like every other industrialized country in the world, and for-profit health insurance companies would be a thing of the past.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
With the planned immigration amnesty, you'll soon be competing against another 30 million people, who will displace enough people from their jobs that they'll be aiming for yours.
Enjoy your future as perpetual serfs of the corporate-media-globalist machine!
Futurist Traditionalism
Taxes should drop under such a scheme. 20% off the top of all bills if you have no malpractice and no insurance middleman overhead. Add in price bargaining, and you'll cut cost per person by less than half. Countries with socialized medicine pay less for a single-payer system than the US pays for medicare alone (not counting anything under the new obamacare). They pay less and cover more with better. Oh God no, make sure we don't get that. I'd rather have a for-profit death panel denying me treatment that results in my death than a non-profit death panel allowing my treatments, that's UnAmerican!
Learn to love Alaska
I understand your attraction to the single payer model. It is true, they could have tried to go that way, but I don't think there was enough political support to do it. There are other ways they could have gone as well that might have been better than what they got. Instead Congress passed a bill on a pretty much party line vote that was whatever they could scrape off the wall in the hopes of just passing anything and then patching it up after it passed. I guess we'll find out what the consequences are.
PRUDEN: Obamacare called ‘The fiasco for the ages’
You might find some irony in this:
Richard Nixon -- the last great liberal
Nixon was not only a fervent supporter of the Clean Air Act, the first federal law designed to control air pollution on the national level; he also gave us the Environmental Protection Agency. The creation of the EPA represented an expansion of government that would face fierce opposition were it being debated today. The EPA is also one of the agencies on Capitol Hill that the business community most detests—along with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which polices working conditions. OSHA is another Nixon creation.
Herbert Stein, chief economic adviser during the administrations of Nixon and Gerald Ford, once remarked: “Probably more new regulation was imposed on the economy during the Nixon administration than in any other presidency since the New Deal.”
How many remember that Nixon was a champion of affirmative action? “Incredible but true”, as Fortune magazine put it in 1994 when Nixon died, “It was the Nixonites that gave us employment quotas.” Though many credit John F. Kennedy or Lyndon Johnson with initiating affirmative action, it was rather Richard Nixon who first sanctioned formal goals and time frames to break barriers to minority employment.
Social Security benefits, a cornerstone of the Democratic Party platform, were also crucial to Nixon’s policies. He ushered in a minimum tax on the wealthy and supported a guaranteed income for all Americans, a move that would rile today’s Republicans to unprecedented heights.
And finally, consider health care: Nixon’s proposed reform would have required employers to buy health insurance for their employees and subsidize those who couldn’t afford it. Nixon’s version of national health care was a far more liberal concept than Bill Clinton’s or Barack Obama’s—and it failed because of Democratic opposition, not lack of support from Nixon’s own party. (Ted Kennedy later said that opposing Nixon’s health-care plan was one of his biggest political regrets.)
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
If only the employers hadn't been dicks and cut hours, then the whole thing would be working as advertised. But the capitalists are experts at optimizing profit at the expense of everything else. It's that attitude that broke the country. It will never recover, the only question is how soon it will fall, and how quickly to recover after (and who it will take with it).
Learn to love Alaska
Completely false.
No, it wasn't. I know it's easy to re-write history years later, but many of us followed it closely. Obama pushed to include Republicans. The Republicans agreed to sit at the table, but would never agree to anything. Obama's fault was to not push it through over the Republicans. Instead, he tried to sell it to them. They feigned interest, and used the delays against Obama. He got agreements from Republicans who later voted against it. He should have just ignored them, and pushed it through. It was tailored to look like a Republican plan for a reason, because a Republican might vote for it.
Obama's failing was that he tried.
Learn to love Alaska
subtract-out the 4.2 million jobs lost during his term, the jobs picture looks less rosy.
Sure, he says he's not responsible for anything that happened in his first term other than his healthcare bill and his stimulus bill (all the bad stuff is Bush's fault of course) but Obama was no country bumpkin who got elected and then came to Washington for the first time just in time to be inaugurated.... Obama and Biden were both Democrat Senators before and during the 2008 meltdown and the Democrats at that time controlled the Senate. No matter how you cut it, he bears at least some responsibility. The BLS table you cite is fine, but it's always easier to see a graph like this one
Furthermore, Ronald Reagan actually did come to Washington from the outside when he inherited a far worse economic situation from Jimmy Carter (I'm old enough to remember it quite well) and Reagan was faced with a congress dominated by the other party (the Democrats ran the House and Senate whereas Obama had an overwhelming 2-to-1 majority control of both the House and Senate) yet Democrats blamed Reagan for the Recession AND all the related job losses. For consistency sake, Obama gets the blame for all the job losses of his terms of office... or else all Democrats must now loudly proclaim that Reagan was a FAR BETTER president than they have been willing to admit.... you don't get to have it both ways.
Obamacare is a Republican idea. That's the reason that it's a byzantine maze of profiteering middlemen: Republicans love their corporate welfare.
Liberals originally wanted single-payer system like that found in most civilized countries.
I'm sorry, but I can't let you abuse history like that. The Affordable Care Act was written by Democrats and passed by Democrats, with little if any input from Republicans. It was Progressives that had input, not Republicans:
Center For American Progress President Shares Part In Obamacare: "I Helped Write The Bill"
The Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) was passed with only 1 Republican vote from the sources I see. 1 Republican in the House, and 0 in the Senate voted for it. The Democrats wrote it, the Democrats passed it, a Democrat President signed it, the Democrats own it from start to finish.. You can't legitimately blame this on Republicans in any way. It's time to grow up and own up.
Even if you want to associate the Republicans or conservatives with having shared the idea for it in some way in the past, there is an issue:
ObamaCare's Heritage
In that 11th Circuit appeal, which is almost certainly headed to the Supreme Court, the Justice Department cited Heritage as an authority in support of its position. Heritage responded with an amicus brief explaining that its view had changed:
If citations to policy papers were subject to the same rules as legal citations, then the Heritage position quoted by the Department of Justice would have a red flag indicating it had been reversed. . . . Heritage has stopped supporting any insurance mandate.
Heritage policy experts never supported an unqualified mandate like that in the PPACA [ObamaCare]. Their prior support for a qualified mandate was limited to catastrophic coverage (true insurance that is precisely what the PPACA forbids), coupled with tax relief for all families and other reforms that are conspicuously absent from the PPACA. Since then, a growing body of research has provided a strong basis to conclude that any government insurance mandate is not only unnecessary, but is a bad policy option. Moreover, Heritage's legal scholars have been consistent in explaining that the type of mandate in the PPACA is unconstitutional.
The Democrats still own it completely, much to their growing discomfort.
PRUDEN: Obamacare called ‘The fiasco for the ages’
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
If you think Obama is a D I have some swampland in Florida you might be interested in, what we have is simply Bush's third and fourth term which is how those at the top wanted it to go.
I mean do you honestly think its a coincidence that Obama supported every jack booted policy that Bush supported, increased spying, increased drone strikes, and pretty much ended up more right wing than the right wing itself? He cashed the check and read from the cue card just like the last guy and the guy before that and so on for several decades now.
There is a REASON why no matter who is in the white house Goldman Sachs is running the fed, why a handful of guys on Wall Street can gamble like its Las Vegas and when they lose we get told they're "too big to fail" and why no matter who you vote for things NEVER get better, only worse. If you honestly and truly believe the right wing gives a flying piss about you when you are not one of the 0.01% I hate to break the news to ya, but they don't and neither does the so called "left".
Every time i see a rant like yours I'm reminded of the late great Bill Hicks "Well I believe the puppet on the left shares MY beliefs! Well I believe the puppet on the right has MY interests at heart....hey wait a minute, there is one guy working both puppets!". There is a reason why all empires fall friend and you are seeing it right before your eyes, those at the top always become too greedy and tilt things so badly out of alignment that the whole thing comes crashing down.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Here's a little assist with the history. You're a bit off.
ObamaCare's Heritage
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
But of course doctors in those other countries do sometimes go on strike
Strikes cause low wages, right?
Learn to love Alaska
It's just so screamingly stupid to put this on employers and say you want to create jobs. We would have been better off leaving it alone until there was the possibility go single payer. Now Obamacare will make a huge mess, and the republicans will point to it and use the failure to prevent anything useful from getting done.
I thought the democrats were supposed to be the smart ones this time around.
But Obama said it wasn't a tax. Yet, that was the argument put forth by SCOTUS. So Obamacare is constitutional now because it's a tax.
Obama is the Teflon Man. Nothing will stick to this guy. "He can do no wrong" is his motto. He's the only man who financially rapes an entire nation and gets praised for doing so.
Life is not for the lazy.
If your competition cuts working hours to 30 to avoid healthcare costs, it they can then keep their prices lower than yours, you have to too or you're out of business. You can't rely on the goodness of people's hearts in capitalism.
The obvious way to solve that problem to make yet another regulation that forces employers to give employees at least 30 hours of work a week. However, that would just lead to even more unemployment. Wage and price controls never work. We need to have a system that doesn't depend on the goodness of people's hearts.
Counter-intuitively, that's probably an even freer market. Let's lower the barriers to hiring and try to reach full employment. Once there, employers will need to compete for workers by offering better pay etc., and the whole standard of life thing lifts itself up by its bootstraps, not by force and regulations. History, and the present day shows this over and over. There's no easy shortcut to riches just by making laws and relying on altruism.
Link
You're not a person. You're not an employee. You're not even worthy of respect.
I don't give a shit about Denmark. Here in the US we have an arm of the government (IRS) singling out a group of people based on their political beliefs for punishment (conservatives). I don't trust the government to run healthcare and not punish me based on my political beliefs.
Then again I'm not a welfare leach that cant get and hold a job. Health benefits arent exactly hard to come by in the US if you're actually willing to, you know, work for a living.
Romney was only governor, bills are still passed by the legislature. Who do you think had control of the legislature in Massachusetts? And the Blue Dog Democrats? They are an endangered species, attacked from the left by progressives and running against Republicans. There were never that many in recent years to begin with. There were other ways the Congress could have expanded coverage without trying to reshape the entire market, but the Democrats didn't want to do that. Democrats are liberals with few exceptions today. They are still constrained by what the voters will support and by how many seats they hold.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
The word's "leech", dipshit.
I don't respond to AC's.
If it had been single payer it wouldn't have passed. It barely had enough support as it was. The rewrites tended to be sweeteners to try to lure in more votes. The rewrites didn't fundamentally change the nature of the bill, the writing of which involved progressive think tanks.
Center For American Progress President Shares Part In Obamacare: "I Helped Write The Bill"
With the bill they passed, Democrats may have ended affordable, quality healthcare.
PRUDEN: Obamacare called ‘The fiasco for the ages’
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Is that covered?
Creating a new tax and forcing people to choose between higher costs or cutting employee's hours is immoral.
Are you out of your fucking mind? Are you serious? Are you such a sucker that you believe the "We have to cut hours or go out of business" bullshit? What a load of horseshit that is. It's a false dichotomy.
I don't respond to AC's.
I think you nailed it and I completely agree with you. Maybe a third party could do it (fix this mess, except the media won't support a 3d party) or things will end up getting ugly, eventually. The masses will only be placated by bread and circuses if they get their 'bread'.
...
Are you kidding? "Job Creators" will be the first people to whine about the corresponding tax increases to cover that kind of scheme.
People like to think money for this kind of stuff just comes from some magical pocket universe somewhere. That's not the case. Spain and Greece are great examples of this.
People need to get over this idea that the idle rich are "job creators".
It's the people who make products and provide services who create jobs and support the economy. For the most part, these people are not rich enough to be paying the top tax bracket.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Of course the Heritage Foundation would try to backpedal now on the fact that they thought of this idea since their Republican backers have become ever more reactionary with each passing year. That doesn't change the fact that they originated the core concept of Obamacare, whether they want to admit it now or not.
Nowadays, they simply don't think there's any problem to address. They're fine with a policy letting people in this country go bankrupt then die every day of treatable diseases.
If you ask them about it, they'll say absurd things like making it impossible to sue doctors would save so much money that even the lowliest Wal Mart associate could pay for leukemia treatments out of pocket. But it's probably just an inside joke. They don't actually give a shit about what happens to those people.
At any rate, the Democrats were stupid enough to play Charlie Brown to the Republicans' Lucy. Each time the Democrats added more Republican ideas to the bill, the Republicans would yank the football away again. That way they can claim that they had "no input" to the law, while trying to keep a straight face.
Exactly.
And the cheapest alternative is to keep the minimum wage so low that 80â of the workers get subsidized in taxpayer funded food stamps and Medicare.
The Walmart & Friends Executive Union is double dipping. They suck profits from their employees' paychecks and cut costs with taxpayers' paychecks and stick them all in their pocket because "you can't have businesses without capital."
Once you buy that, it's a simple step to accept that human health absolutely MUST be a "for profit" enterprise. If there is no profit for someone, it must not be good for any one, right?
As long as the capitalists control the conversation, the only relevant result is profit. Nothing else matters.
They also don't have large numbers of blacks or Native Americans (a group that comprises nearly all Hispanics of Central and North America, as well as being a major component of the ethnic makeup of a lot of nominally white people), both of which ethnic groups have much higher rates of obesity, diabetes, and cardiac disease than Europeans.
Not only that, part of the problem is that the US started from a relatively high cost basis - it's actually below the OECD mean for health care inflation over 2000-2009 (source).
Unless you're part of the massive private insurance business rolling in piles of money from denied claims.
I know this will not be a popular opinion here - and I will likely be moderated into oblivion for even daring to suggest it on this right-leaning site - but seriously a single-payer healthcare system could do a lot to resolve this problem. There are a large number of people in this country who seek out full-time work not because they want to work 40 hours or because they even want to live the lifestyle of a full-timer, but because it is the only way to get health care (and don't try to claim that the health insurance bailout act called "obamacare" changes this in a meaningful way, because it really doesn't). There are plenty of people who would take a 25% pay cut to work 30 hours if they could still get health care, but the vast majority of employers in this country won't allow it. There are others who would work fewer hours and then take the time difference to pursue an education or vocational training (and are hence instead stuck in a dead end position because they have lost that flexibility). There are even some who would take two part-time jobs to accommodate their scheduling needs, but again can't do it because of health care.
These people won't be served by the current system, or any system that has been proposed in the past two decades. These people would also make jobs available by leaving full time positions, which would help those who seek full-time employment currently.
But instead our "main stream media" has told us such things are "un-American" and "communist". Why will we never get single-payer health care in the US? The same reason we'll never get solar power or a manned mission to Mars; people make more money on the current system than changing it to anything else.
I've already put on my fucking asbestos. Flame away.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Yes. Now the companies that have given health benefits because if they didn't nobody would work there, can blame Obama for everything. If Obama didn't exist, they wouldn't have him to blame. I always got health care benefits with my full time permanent jobs. Good workers wouldn't work any place that didn't. It's a $15k or so benefit.
Learn to love Alaska
you don't want the slaves being told they have rights, do you?
Advantage to the employer of offering only part time/temporary employment through an agency:
No unions to deal with (there is no temp union anywhere)
No pensions to contribute to (part timers don't get an employer-provided pension)
No liability (for things like temps breaking their wrists - been there, worn the t-shirt, had to foot the fucking medical bill myself!)
No employers rates (things like tax/NI which is a bloody headache if you're dealing with hundreds of employees all of whim pay tax/NI and since most of them will be on PAYE, it's all on your books which means that for every employee you have to garnish their pay by 20someodd% and send it to the Treasury, on top of which a recent additional tax which is scaled according to how many *full time* employees you have)
No contracts (except with the agency, where it's pretty much a case of "I have this many spaces, I accept your rates, send me bodies.")
No medical insurance (you're not employing the slave, you're employing the agency, *the agency* employs the slave and their employment contract more often than not has a specific medical disclaimer. See above)
No employment tribunals (you're contracting with the agency, not the slave)
Minimal wage bill (they may pay a premium for being able to hire through an agency, but it's still cheaper than employing someone full time who's not up to the task and not being able to fire them because they've technically done nothing wrong)
Maximum profit per unit labour
Advantage to the employee:
None. I don't count being able to work to pay your rent an advantage, that is a basic need along with food, clothing and medical intervention when necessary.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Your dumb analogy has convinced me that I am wrong.
No irony, it's just depressing but not entirely unexpected in a land where simple Christian charity is now seen as Communism.
Now you guys know what US politics of the last thirty years looks like from the outside. Two different factions of effectively one party for corporations. One faction has more absolute nutters than the other but those nutters are mostly irrelevant in practice.
Doesn't matter so much since the costs for them to practise medicine (insurance, legal costs etc) are much higher in the US as well so they are not any better off than in some other countries with lower doctors income.
And I hate to say it but being in the trenches i can say its true, the reason is Obamacare which i said before it passed was gonna be a disaster, and wadda ya know? it is.
It's an excuse, but I've worked for Kelly before, though that was in 1998. I got paid $12/hr. They charged $45/hr. They were making $70k per year off me (pro-rated, I only needed temp work for a few weeks). For that price, you could easily afford health care. How many insurance plans have you seen at $6000 per month?
Learn to love Alaska
Exactly and the troll can rant about "dumbocrats" or whatever spoonfed shit he has been handed by faux news but in reality there is ONLY ONE PARTY, and that is the pro corporate fascist party, and its been that way for a good 30 or 40 years now.
In my own state the pundits had a living shitfit over the "DINO" that kissed the corporate ass, so they ran her out...only to get a RINO that kisses the corporate ass. THAT is your choice, its not even Coke VS pepsi, its Coke in a can VS Coke in a bottle, at the end of the day the same 0.01% get the money, the same names behind the scenes, the same disparity, the same ever widening gulf between the top and everyone else.
At the end of the day I say look to the east, look at the Arab Springs for that IS our future, when those at the top have stolen the last dime they possibly can and left the poor with nothing and cut off what little aid they had THEN we shall see REAL change, as the masses rise up and hang the rich that are stupid enough not to "get to teh choppa!" from the nearest tree. This is why NO empire lasts forever, you can only tilt things so far out of alignment before the whole rotten mess comes tumbling down. I truly believe it will happen in my lifetime,maybe even within the next 20 years if the stock market bubble they have been blowing since the 80s finally pops.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Funny you should mention that because my oldest, which is as "true believer" as you can get now refuses to step into ANY church because he sat there in shock as they basically proclaimed their love for Supply Side Jesus and spoke of their disdain for the poor. In one church they asked him when he was walking out why he was leaving and he said "I know this place, its the same kind of place Jesus took a whip to, you can't worship money and God in the same breath". Man what I wouldn't have given to see that!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
eventually (a few decades perhaps) machines will repair and maintain everything and all maintenance jobs will cease
And once such machines escape the control of their clueless human minders, we'll have the makings of a great Hollywood post-apocalyptic thriller. For example, what happens when a machine designed to fix and maintain a factory decides instead to fix and maintain a housing complex in the same manner?
Even in the case where humans have nothing to contribute, humans have to continue to occupy critical bottlenecks of control or risk getting obsoleted and perhaps deleted. it's a standard parasite problem.
If only the employers hadn't been dicks and cut hours
Well, you have to be firm or you won't keep a business. For example, 50 full-time employees means an additional $40k a year (it's $2k per employee above the first 30, but only after you pass the 50 employee mark) in costs over 67 30 hour a week employees just in minimal health care costs (that is, paying the penalty and dumping employees on the state exchanges). Similarly, 100 full-time employees is $140k more than 133 part-time employees for the same amount of work. That's a premium of $0.70 per hour (roughly).
But the capitalists are experts at optimizing profit at the expense of everything else.
At least, they're experts at something useful. The people who just made full time employees expensive enough to change the US labor market? They're experts at breaking society.
As I see it, US society is routing around the damage. The new normal will just have to be multiple part time jobs until such time as the regulations which led to this result are revoked or heavily improved.
An awful lot of problems occur because this is a hackish attempt at socialised medicine designed to piss off the least amount of big business. Just go full socialised medicine already. This problem would not exist. Work only 10 hours a week? No problem, your National Health Service will still admit you. A heart condition discovered before your poor parents could get you health insurance? The National Health Service will still admit you.
There is lots of arguments about the quality of the National Health Services in various European countries. There is, for instance, a long-standing argument about privatisation of hospital services (in the sense that the government, not the patient, would be the customer), but as of yet, I haven't seen any major political party (right or left) advocating we get rid of it. It would be political suicide.
The "every man for himself" mindset is completely alien to us on this point. Especially since we know that even having medical insurance is not a guarantee that a for-profit company will actually pay out when you need to. And it most definitely would be too late to "take your money elsewhere" at that stage.
That's not the case. Spain and Greece are great examples of this.
No. Spain and Greece are great examples of a typical boom and bust where too much is attempted in a short amount of time using borrowed money in a country with large amounts of corruption and tax evasion both from greedy big shots and "Average Joe [tm]". The same is the case for Ireland and the other countries struggling the worst in Europe. Ireland had a Taoiseach (Prime Minister) who didn't have a bank account for years, but kept cash in his office safe and received "gifts" from influential businessmen. This is a milder version of the same problem that exists in most African countries.
You never mentioned Sweden, Finland, Germany, etc. who all have socialised medicine and whos main economic problem at the moment are paying for the mess of southern Europe (and Ireland).
If you think Obama is a D I have some swampland in Florida you might be interested in, what we have is simply Bush's third and fourth term which is how those at the top wanted it to go.
I can't agree with that, and here's why. Obama has largely continued Bush's national security policies, and in some cases expanded them, but in terms of economic and social policy has gone in a very different direction than the Bush administration. In that regard I don't think Obama has done anything really different than FDR or Truman would have done. No major party wants to be the one that gets large numbers of voters killed by an enemy, or terrorists. They can't really blame that on the other party even if they wanted to, so that is likely to turn out badly for them at the polls. I don't think you could seriously suggest that the Bush administration wouldn't have defended DOMA in court, or that Bush would have signed some of the economic regulation bills into law that Obama passed, and plenty of other things. [ Well, maybe he would have - Bush didn't use the veto pen much, but I think it is much less likely he would have supported some of the things that Obama did. At the very least there would have been a lot more signing statements. ;) ]
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
All jobs are temporary. At some point you quit, are fired, are laid off, retire, or die.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Shhhh...don't tell anybody - but all those people are already working. Except, of course, that they know they're not supposed to be so they'll work on the side for half of what they would get if they were legal and they don't complain about getting any benefits. It's businesses that employ this shadow workforce that are afraid of amnesty - their costs will go up dramatically once these illegals are brought out into daylight. That's why the right is against it - increased labor costs.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
only 1 republican in both house and senate, combined, voted for the bill.
I'm on board with you with the larger point, but this part is false. ABSOLUTELY ZERO Republicans voted for Obama care.
so we should regulate all businesses out of business?
its easy to pass a law ("there oughta be a law!!")
but these laws do have a cost.
you can raise prices, but only so much of that cost can be passed onto consumers overnight.
raise prices too much too fast and consumers go somewhere else.
believe it or not, most business owners dont piss on their employees. but neither do they run their companies as jobs programs. they're in it to make a buck (shocker!), and if they go out of business, no one is happy. they're not all saints, but theyre not all satan either.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
LA had a republican from 1993 to 2001.
NY had Guiliani.
But let's not let facts get in the way...(ok im being pedantic)
But also you have to consider....if the places are so godawful bad...why do they keep electing Dems, even in Texas? And continue to grow in population and economy (except Detroit...that place if fubar)? Maybe you should tone down the partisan reality blinders.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
also, if you think Obama is so godawful bad...please tell me what you thought of Bush, considering Obama let stand most of Bush's policies, even after campaigning on a platform of "change", and even expanded many of them (eg: the drone strikes, and illegal immigrant deportations) ?
The phrase "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss" is quite apt.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Why do you think this is a good thing?
People always could get private health insurance, only now they are required to. Private insurance will run you around $100/mth if you're a fit young person, and that's usually for a high copay/deductible plan.
‘Bingo’: Iowahawk sums up the jobs report in one tweet about Taco Bell
David Burge @iowahawkblog
Unemployment report in a nutshell: the Taco Bell that had 30 40 hour workers now has 40 30 hour workers.
Behind the Dismal Jobs Numbers: The ‘New’ Economy Takes Shape
Another way to look at this is that corporations will cut costs wherever possible, including not offering benefits at all if they're not forced (one way or another) to do so.
Part time workers need health care too and this is just one more example of how companies really don't give a shit about their employees.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
WalMart is a large employer of temp workers too. The permanent full-time job with salary is going the way of the dodo bird. This life sucks.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
Wow, name calling without citing a single fact. Impressive, but typically liberal retort. It is as if name calling wins discussions. Does that really work in your circles?
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
the actual affect is to reduce their hours from 40 hrs a week + overtime to a strict less than 30 hours
Cheapskate companies like Wal-Mart were already doing this. Have been for decades. Once you hit the magic number of 40 hours, they were already required to provide health care (and pay into unemployment, etc).
The difference here is that they were given a new "magic number" of 30, so the cheapskates who had all their employees working 39 hours a week (on the books), now move it down to 30. I suspect the only reason you are hearing complaints about it now is that the cheapskate companies are worried that the extra off-the-books hours they have been routinely demanding from their employees will have to be cut back now too, or they will become much harder to extract and hide.
How about this for an idea: Instead of complaining about the labor laws, why don't we instead try to do something about the labor scofflaws? Even pre-Obamacare, they were sticking the rest of us with all their employees heal care costs, unemployment costs when they "fired" them without paying anything into the insurance fund, etc. Why not attack the real problem here?
People always could get private health insurance. Not if they where sick or had an pre existing conditions. Insurers' pre-existing conditions include being a cop, expectant father, or having acne.
Dont know about you but my Doctor gives me a 50% discount if I pay in cash. Turns out to be less than the cost my insurance bills me as my "co-pay". He saves the money because he does not have to have 3 people dedicated to validating the insurance, billing the different insurance agencies, and a collection person whos job it is to get the insurance companies to pay him.
It is not your employer's job to give you health insurance. Sure, it's a nice BENEFIT but that's all it's supposed to be, a benefit.
Does this seem sad to anyone else? I mean, I kinda see how it's part of American business culture right now and only worried about the bottom line. If that bottom line needs to be 'lined' per say with the cost savings of temp workers so be it according to corp group-think. Too bad we can't go back to thinking that if you pay a decent wage maybe your employees will be able to afford your product...
Not very. Different services, same business model, same shafting (pun intended) of the actual workers.
(((dB)))
or, you get the cheapest homeowners insurance possible (due to a mandate), then when your house burns down, you drop it and get some with better coverage.
Interesting complaint. You *do* realize that what you complain about worked under the old system as well. You were covered for pre-existing conditions when changing insurance, but not when getting new insurance. When you have the basics so wrong, how can people believe you for your other conclusions?
Most Americans were covered through work insurance. So the system expanded the most popular method of coverage. It didn't work as expected, but isn't nearly as illogical as you assert. Again, you are wrong on all accounts.
Anything other than single-payer was going to be welfare for the insurance companies, and that appears to have been the goal all along. Only the insurance companies win.
Learn to love Alaska
And I've been hospitalized. The cash price was listed as $1000, and "insurance discount" was more than 50%. Cash price was well above what the insurance company pays. Maybe it's different for a small independent doctor. All two of them left. The only time I've seen an independent doctor was for a flight medical, which no insurance covers anyway. Every other doctor I've seen was affiliated with a hospital or national clinic chain. There aren't that many options that aren't.
Learn to love Alaska
You are correct that "meet the new boss" isn't apt alright, a MUCH better analogy would be "Bush The Sequel" because all he did was take everything Bush was for and made it bigger, nastier, and more fascist leaning, no different than how a sequel always seem to take the main beats of a movie and just amps up the action.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Uhhh...Obamacare is damned near a copy of Romneycare and BOTH were written by The Heritage Foundation. Look them up you'll see its a RIGHT WING think tank and they pretty much wrote the whole thing and Obama merely stumped for their package.
Do a little digging dude and you'll quickly find its ALL Kayfabe to get the masses like the troll above foaming, the actual so called "left leaning" shit passed under Obama was actually written by the right and the same top 0.1% make out like bandits under those policies. At the end of the day Ventura summed it up when he talked about his time in office "Its no different than pro wrestling, you have a couple of talking points that let your heel and face have something to argue about but when the camera is off they go to lunch with the same lobbyist who tells them what to pass this week".
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Yes I do and here is why, because when the jobs are all going temp, with 41,000 factories sent overseas since 2001, what do both parties have for talking points? Mexicans and gays, 2 things the big corps could give a wet fat fuck about!
So I'm sorry Mrs AC (seriously make a fucking account dude, it takes like 3 minutes and you can put in any bullshit you want) but just as pro wrestling has their "drama" which is in reality shit neither guy gives a rat fuck about so too is the only "differences" you are allowed to have only on shit big corps don't give a fuck about. Big corps don't give a fuck about Mexicans, they can hire illegals all day long and any bill passed won't be allowed to change that, and they could care even less about what some gay does in their bedroom.
If you want proof how rigged it REALLY is, and this is coming from someone that leans socialist and hates libertarians (I think they come in 2 flavors, one that wants a gov to whip the slaves, the other wants to hire a goon squad to do the whipping) just look up "Jon Stewart Ron Paul" to see the entire MSM in any place he was doing even slightly well turn Paul into Voldemort, Stewart even has a clip of an entire round table talking about the first,second, and FOURTH place finishers and not once do they ever even admit that third place existed! Follow that up with Alex Jones on Ron Paul, while Jones may be a nutter most of the time he has footage showing the RNC voice vote that would have allowed the Paul party to be heard had the RESULTS ON THE PROMPTER before the vote was even cast!
So I'm sorry AC, you are merely being fooled by the Kayfabe and anything that would affect the bottom line, disparities in free trade, corporate bribery of elected officials, the rising income gap, NONE of that is allowed on the table. Its like George Carlin said "You know why things never get any better no matter who you vote for? because the OWNERS want it that way!" and he was sadly 100% correct.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
The Republicans voted against it because they don't want Obama to succeed at anything. Rush Limbaugh said "I hope he fails" in regards to Obama at the start of his first term, voicing the mindset of every Republican who was upset about McCain. Him winning a second term was just rubbing salt on the Obamacare wound.
The current House is the most obstructionist, obstinate, oligarchical gaggle of do-nothings the United States has ever seen. It's frankly embarrassing. However, they would rather sit around and do absolutely nothing - pass no bills, not even ones that would shrink government and save money like they say they want to do - because any bill that passes through both the House and the Senate to be signed by Obama is a success for Obama. And they can't have that, now can they?
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Yup, but for the intractability of Congress and insufficient push by Obama, single-payer is the way. What the House gets is what we get or vice versa; the People's house, doncha know.
See the post below viz. Nixon. For all the crazy things ol' Tricky Dick got up to, he had a good head on his shoulders otherwise. Also worth mentioning, his wage and price freeze took the wind from the sails of a shitty situation and allowed time for some other stuff to work. Worst part was when Congress over his objections voted to borrow against OASDI revenues to apply to the general fund - and they've never paid and revoked those instruments - we're still paying for that bit of aggrandizement.
Obamacare was written by members of the Democratic party with assistance from the progressive think tank, the Center for American Progress.
Center For American Progress President Shares Part In Obamacare: "I Helped Write The Bill"
The Heritage Foundation did at one point have a plan for a vaguely similar idea, but it differed significantly in important details, and they eventually concluded it was the wrong path to take. You can find details here: ObamaCare's Heritage
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
I recall that when my mother got Cancer, she not only had to continue making payments for her insurance (despite the fact that she couldn't work, and so, didn't have a whole lot of money), but she also had to go through some trouble to keep her employer's insurance, since any new insurance wouldn't cover what would be a pre-existing condition from their point of view. This required that she return to work after a certain period of time, since if she did not, the laws that allow her to keep her employer's insurance would run out, and they'd cancel the insurance, and then she'd be fucked. Basically, health insurance doesn't insure you against illness, it insures you against doctor bills. Stop paying for the insurance and your future doctor bills aren't covered, regardless of whether they're the result of a condition you acquired while covered or not.
Every insurance I've ever had (all employer provided) would cover any and all pre-existing conditions (provided you had no lapse in coverage). Your one counter-example doesn't trump my personal experience (just as you claim mine doesn't trump yours). Yes, if I shopped non-work coverage, I'd likely have had issues, but most insurance is work-related, so it's still true for the general case. And yes, losing your insurance sucks. If you have gaps, you'll lose pre-existing coverage.
If the previous system worked as you describe, then they did a hell of a job keeping it a secret, because no one I know believes it works that way.
You only hang out with unemployed people.
Anyway, it is illogical. 1: Not everyone is employed at all times, but everyone needs coverage at all times.
I've not had a gap in employment greater than a month in the past 20 years, and no gap greater than 6 months since birth. And that's with 20-30 jobs so far, 2 layoffs, 2 moves with no jobs lined up after the move (one from Texas to Alaska and one to outside the US, to a country with universal care for all).
2: What about children, infants, unborn babies? They all need health care as well, but none are old enough to work. Is it fair to make their health dependent upon their parent's employment?
That's how I was covered for the first 23 years of my life, and nobody complained then. It's only when someone does something to try to fix it that people come out and complain that the proposed system sucks, though it looks almost identical to the previous system. Why is that?
3: Tying health care to employment just causes employers to require employees to work overtime, which defeats the purpose of overtime pay, which was created to encourage them to allow people to have some time off.
Working overtime defeats the purpose of overtime pay? Again, you are off the deep end without a clue, or a paddle.
Health care via employment is just an idea to replace the fact that employers are no longer allowed to have us all live in the company town and pay us with the company currency which is good only at the company store. They simply invented a new company currency and called it "health care."
Official unemployment hasn't jumped since this, and is officially about 7.6%. When 93% of people are employed to the level they desire (according to government measures), then yes, you can round that to 100% and declare that tying health care to employment fixes the problem, then have special programs for the 7% missed. You personally disagree, but the numbers don't support your position.
Learn to love Alaska
The robot uprising angle, while humorous, has already happened.
I note that you don't actually give an example of this alleged uprising.
It's worth remembering here that most jobs done by robots and other machines would not in their absence be done by people. We wouldn't have an internet powered by people in the absence of sophisticated machines (many much more sophisticated than the robots in your hypothetical factory). We wouldn't have a zillion people with buckets in the absence of our considerably automated public sanitation systems. We wouldn't have an army of mentats performing vast mind numbing calculations in the absence of computers to do the same.
We wouldn't have remotely operated robotics to perform such hazardous and onerous duties as swapping nuclear fuel rods, deep sea construction, and Solar System exploration.
Those 5,000 skilled welders are mostly retired now, but with no one replacing them there are 5,000 fewer excellent paying jobs in the region.
There are more of other excellent paying jobs. For example, the technicians who maintain this equipment. Or the people who are employed because the car company produces cheaper, higher quality cars.
Well, it is easy to think things are fine when they're working just fine for you. I guess I'll give up on this point. ...except I must state my confusion
Your confusion is obvious. I had never heard a complaint about child-insurance being tied to the parent until relatively recently. How else would you have it handled? I'm wasn't talking about my complaint, or my parents, but society at large seemed quite content with "children under parent" coverage. You presented it like it was some massive unsolved problem. You appear to be unique. And confused.
I'd recommend you leave such out of your arguments. They only make you sound desperate to discredit me as a lunatic.
Oh yes, I'm desperate. If there's one A/C on the Internet that doesn't agree with me, I'll never sleep again. OMFG, somewhere, someone on the Internet is wrong!.
Really, I'm just pointing out your lunacy so that anyone else running across this will recognize it for what it is and not pay any attention to you, and your wrong opinion, repeatedly proven wrong by reality.
You might try learning a little about history some time. There was this thing called "The New Deal" created to get us out of the great depression. Included things like overtime pay, to encourage employers to hire more workers rather than force their existing workers to work 80 hour weeks. Strangely enough, it did what it was supposed to. Employers hired more people. The subsequent reduction in unemployment increased wages and improved working conditions since employees stood a chance of finding a new job if they left their current employer.
You are missing the point entirely. Overtime is 1.5 pay. If there's an issue where we want to force actions through regulation, and people are pushing for paid overtime above historic levels, then the easy fix is set overtime pay to 2x, or whatever multiplier gets the desired results. You've proven it worked before, so why are you abandoning the tested technique you endorse for a modern issue? Illogic like that is why I say things like you are clueless You remind me of the insane old tinkerer who fabricates a screwdriver when his old one turns up missing, spending $20 in materials and 6 hours on what could have been replaced for $5 and a 10 minute walk to the nearest store. You might be right on a point or two, but you are missing the big picture and doing it all wrong.
Learn to love Alaska
Sorry, you're wrong on that. There currently is no such thing as individual, non-group health insurance. Sure, it does exist on paper, but it's such an unrealistically priced rip-off that it only makes sense for very well to do upper middle class. If you happen to be anything less, you must have it through your employer or you won't have any. That's the reality of it.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
If the ACA was a roaring success, would you give all the credit to the (R)s ? I rather doubt you'd give any credit to the Heritage Foundation or the (R)s, this is just you being hypocritical party douchebag. You and your (R) counterparts are the very reason we're so screwed.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
An awful lot of problems occur because this is a hackish attempt at socialised medicine designed to piss off the least amount of big business. Just go full socialised medicine already.
But that's communism! Do you want Stalin to rule America?
But that's taking my hard-earned money (I get from my capital gains)! Do you want to kill jobs?
But that's giving a free ride (to people who are doomed by the country's education and employment structure to be forever un- or under-employed)! Do you want brown people to have the same chance of surviving till retirement as real people like me?!?!
*attempts to dislodge his tongue from his cheek, which takes some time*
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
No, they'll just all follow suit with Wal Mart and make sure nobody ever gets enough hours to tip over that threshold.
Then the model should change so that an "employer" will pay a percentage towards healthcare for the employee regardless of the number of hours.
Combined with a lower overall rate for any employee that works full time to motivate employers in that direction, it would put an end to this shit where companies don't want to hire anyone because they don't want to pay any benefits.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
So why do most of the other countries in the developed world, that do have universal health care, deliver better overall health care outcomes for 60% less (10% of GDP) than the current US system (16% of GDP)?
To add to that, I live in Europe now and move around a lot so I took a private health insurance package that works wherever I need it to.
I took coverage everywhere in the world except the US...because if I wanted to have just that one more country added my premiums went up by 70%.
Doubters can contact the insurer (http://www.bupa-intl.com/) and get a quote themselves.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
Companies shouldn't have to worry about providing insurance to workers, regardless. They should be able to focus on the cost of running their business with static expenses. Countries like Denmark has some of the highest individual entrepreneurship rates in the world. Why? Because the government takes care of providing health care to everyone, as well as all schooling through college. Obviously these are all funded through higher tax rates, but it leaves a lot of unknown headaches from businesses and manages to provide everyone an opportunity to succeed.
Not to mention that Denmark is one of the happiest countries in the world:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2013/01/09/the-worlds-happiest-and-saddest-countries-2/
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
Actually I have a feeling we socialists will put the libertarians next to the rich against the walls. I've found there are only TWO kinds of libertarians, one wants a government to whip their slaves, the other wants to hire a goon squad to whip the slaves because they don't trust the government to do an effective job at slave whipping.
You name any libertarian position and it will ALWAYS end up "the rich guy wins" no matter how you spin it. I had a good back and forth with the guy from freedomainradio (which is the most ultra libertarian you want to meet) and hopefully I turned some away from that toxic belief system because it was so damned easy to show how the answer always ends up "the rich guy wins" under libertarianism. I mean for fucks sake he truly believed the way to stop crime is through insurance policies! Riiiight, and if I'm a billionaire that brings in 20 mil plus business a year to the insurance company they are REALLY gonna give a fuck if my favorite hobby is raping 16 year old peasants on the weekends, when the peasants put together isn't paying them as much in a year as i do in a week.
I'm sorry but the end result of libertarianism is just a new name for a very old concept...feudalism. Its as old as history 1.- Gather wealth by any means, 2.- Hire goon squad, 3.- become God and do what you want to the peasants. Hell I would argue the world of Rapture in Bioshock was actually a best case scenarios, more likely you would have had Ryan and Atlas splitting the place and the peasants lives would have been worth nothing. We already have made the majority of labor no longer required thanks to tech, what would you do with those people? Put them in camps?
Sorry libertarian but the future is gonna be socialism and communism NOT libertarianism. Unlimited markets create monsters, see the age of the robber barons for a perfect example. Ironic that libertarians rail against the anti-business laws PUT IN PLACE BY ROBBER BARONS who were created by the very free markets you champion. You created the monsters friend, they are your mess.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Obamacare was passed with Dems having a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and having control of the House.
Except you can't count the few 'blue dog' democrats. Liberman and other dems would not have voted for single-payer. In effect, there never was a filibuster proof Senate because of those blue dogs.
There are many factors at work that make US healthcare cost more. Doctor pay is just one of them, but I'd argue that is more of a symptom rather than a cause.
The cause is 'for profit'. All levels of health care and health insurance are trying to make a profit. Of course it is going to cost more.
For instance, Hospital A and Hospital B want to open a neurosurgery centers. Both compete and try to recruit top talent. The hospital that gets the best doctors is going to see the most revenue from monopolizing the neurosurgery market in that area. Doctor takes the job with whichever hospital offered him the most. The doctor is in the game to make money, the hospital is in the game to make money, etc...
Bottom line is that now the patient is paying for a surgery based on a doctors salary that was artificially jacked up because of a battle between two for profit hospitals.
Take the 'for profit' out of health care, and costs all along the supply chain will drop. Let a single entity do the bargaining, and costs will be driven down even further.
Single-payer just makes sense when the customer can't bargain or shop for the product.
Russ Feingold was by far the most liberal Senator in many decades.
The ONLY reason Obama looks like a liberal is because the republican party has gone so far right that Teddy Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan would no longer be welcome as Republicans if they were still living.
Ask true liberals what they think of Obama, it won't be much different(minus the racist crap) that the tea-baggers carry on about.
The funny thing about this: " From NY to LA, all democratic run and every single fucking one of them is a welfare state, police state, verge of bankruptcy shit hole" is that both California and New York get less federal dollars than they pay in and the "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" states like Mississippi, Alabama, SC, NC, Alaska, etc get more from the federal government then they pay in. Which means it is the far right hell-holes sucking on the federal tit and these evil liberal states are funding them.
Exactly
The US is a one party state masquerading as a two-party state that is controlled by corporate interests.
The only reason they keep up the illusion of choice is because it keeps people divided.
The US has long become a Fascist government. It started right about the time Eisenhower let the military industrial complex take over in the 50's, but didn't really take hold until Reagan let these sociopaths off their leash entirely. .
Theodore Roosevelt was the first prominent politician to suggest it.
Not sure if serious. Businessmen have always been and will always be sociopathic blood-suckers. Why it surprises you that they would screw over employees, with so much rich history, is a little confusing.
I've been meaning to reply to this for two reasons. In certain respects I find it one of the more intriguing posts I recall you making. I also wanted to thank you for providing the correct period for the discovery of mineral deposits in Afghanistan some weeks ago. I normally try to be correct and I should have looked it up.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell