Are you a small business worried about the healthcare laws? Hate dealing with the requirements of the Affordable Care Act, commonly referred to by the name of the president who signed it into law?
Well, there's a California company named ShiftPixy – no, we're not making that up – that will take those employees off your hands. Sorta.
The ideal is to let them keep working for you, but put them on ShiftPixy’s payroll.
Much like the model pioneered by staffing companies, they would get benefits and pay from ShiftPixy, while you would pay a fee to let someone else worry about such things.
Of course, it's basically something that staffing companies like Robert Half and Kelly Services and Adecco already do. But ShiftPixy's very existence is about this kind of thing, according to the company's press release:
“ShiftPixy, Inc. was created to take advantage of weaknesses in compulsory insurance markets where statutory requirements for business owners collide with the extremely limited access to the coverage and compliance they are required to have.”
It's hard to say how much of a market there is for this. Because the ACA, okay, Obamacare doesn't kick in until you have 50 employees and it applies only to employees making 30 hours or more a week.
So the incentive to cut workers – or shave their hours – isn't really intense unless you are close to one or both of those markers. Still, there might be a bunch of modestly-sized comapnies that are. ShiftPixy sure thinks so.
Scott Absher, CEO of the company cites a survey of more than 600 small business owners that found 20 percent of them – one in five – cutting the number of they employ.
Other surveys show employers planning to make similar cuts, he said.
At least some legal analysts have warned that cutting someone just because of the new law could be viewed as retaliation – and therefore illegal.
In any event, the overall data are mixed.
Since the law was passed, the economy has added millions of full-time jobs. But the number of part-time jobs has been relatively flat.
Drilling down into the numbers, the analytical site FiveThirtyEight found a decrease in the number of people working between 31 and 34 hours. They found an increase in the number working a little less than 30 hours.
But of course, you can’t tell how many of those were people who wanted to work part-time and now don’t have to give up healthcare coverage to do it.
For what it's worth, FiveThirtyEight concluded that if there's been an impact, it has been small.
But for any employee who is affected, it could be a big deal. And if a company can outsource the problem, it might be more willing to add workers and hours.
So could it be that the pixies at ShiftPixy are on to something?
Oh, by the way, FiveThirtyEight also found that the infield shift works in baseball. But that's a story for another time.
