The ACA defines "full-time" employment as working an average of 30 hours per week. Larger employers not offering health insurance coverage for full-time workers are assessed a fee to help finance federal subsidies that eligible workers could receive when enrolling in individual insurance exchanges . First, the universe of workers vulnerable to having hours cut back due to the incentives of the mandate would have to be significant, in the aggregate or by industry. Second, there would be a clear decrease in average hours worked per week at the time of implementation that is not accounted for by overall economic conditions.
Third, there would be a greater cluster of workers appearing at or near 29 hours per week. Fourth, there would be a shift in the composition of net job growth, toward involuntary part-time work and away from full-time work. Related to assurance of parity in pay benefits are policies that set minimum and maximum work hours that jobs must offer. Some countries require that part-time workers get a minimum of work hours. In Algeria, part-timers must receive not less than half of the statutory working time. Denmark allows collective agreements to prescribe a minimum of 15 hours per week for part-time work.
France provides a minimum target of 24 hours per week for part-time workers. Some countries also have maximum thresholds for part-timers—such as not to exceed 30 hours per week or 120 hours per month—which may prevent "involuntary full-time" working, i.e., unwelcome additional hours. Overtime is sometimes outright prohibited for part-time workers , or allowed only in emergency cases . In South Korea it is allowed but requires the agreement of the part-time worker, cannot exceed 12 extra hours per week, and comes with a pay premium for work beyond the normal work hours of full-time employees. Finally, some laws aim to facilitate the transfer from full-time to part-time work and vice versa. In Romania, employers must, as much as possible, take into account the demands of their employees to be transferred either from full-time to part-time work or vice versa.
Clearly part-time employment, especially involuntary part-time employment, has various adverse consequences. In addition to traditional expansionary policies that would heighten demand for more hours of labor, we need policy innovations to help curb the excessive use of part-time employment by many employers and address the harmful effects of involuntary part-time work. Moreover, laws requiring that workers receive minimum pay for shifts that are canceled or schedules that are changed, along with unemployment insurance reforms would both incentivize reductions and mitigate the adverse impacts of involuntary part-time working. The biggest disadvantage that part-time workers face is their relatively lower rates of pay and their benefit coverage. Prior research shows that the part-time wage penalty (the percent less in hourly wages that part-timers make relative to similar full-timers) is 19 percent for men and 9 percent for women. Part-time jobs, particularly those with the fewest weekly hours, also provide relatively less access to benefit coverage.
Part-timers have only one-third the access to health insurance coverage as do full-timers—22 percent compared with 73 percent. The federal law most relevant to the distinction between part- and full-time employment is the Affordable Care Act, which requires that large employers share the financial responsibility of health insurance for full-time employees. The law defines full-time work as at least 30 hours per week or 130 hours per month. Companies that meet the threshold for size must either offer an affordable health insurance plan to these full-time employees or pay a penalty for not offering coverage. No company, regardless of size, is required by the federal government to subsidize health insurance for part-time employees who work fewer than 30 hours per week or 130 hours per month.
Generally, business sector agrees that it is important to achieve work–life balance, but does not support a legislation to regulate working hours limit. They believe "standard working hours" is not the best way to achieve work–life balance and the root cause of the long working hours in Hong Kong is due to insufficient labor supply. Hong Kong has no legislation regarding maximum and normal working hours. The average weekly working hours of full-time employees in Hong Kong is 49 hours. In Hong Kong, 70% of surveyed do not receive any overtime remuneration. These show that people in Hong Kong concerns the working time issues.
As Hong Kong implemented the minimum wage law in May 2011, the Chief Executive, Donald Tsang, of the Special Administrative Region pledged that the government will standardize working hours in Hong Kong. Second, employees can be disqualified from benefits in many states if they seek only part-time work, even if their qualifying employment and earnings came exclusively from part-time work. The UI Modernization Act gave grants to states to encourage them to allow otherwise monetarily eligible claimants with a part-time work history to search and be available only for part-time work. Nonetheless, as many as 21 states still require UI claimants to search for a full-time job. Eligibility for UI should be extended to more part-time workers and, indeed, to anyone who wants to reduce his or her work schedule for compelling reasons, including personal health and child care responsibilities. The federal government should enact a minimum standard in which workers qualify for UI benefits as long as the work being sought is for at least 20 hours per week .
For the entitlement to annual paid leave, countries have instituted various formulas. Japan for example has a threshold of 30 hours per week entitling the employee to the same amount of annual leave as full-time workers, plus a minimum number of days of leave for those who work less than 30 hours per week. Others, such as Brazil, specify the number of days of leave to which part-time employees are entitled according to the number of hours they work per week.
In France, the same rules are used to calculate holiday pay for both part-time and full-time workers. Some countries require a minimum number of work hours to qualify for retirement pension contributions also received by full-timers, as in Ireland. In South Africa, employees who work less than 24 hours per month for an employer are not covered by the majority of their law's working-time provisions. When people in the U.S. talk about benefits, health insurance is usually top of mind. While some employers do offer health insurance to some or all part-time employees, many do not.
So even if your employer considers you a part-time employee because you work less than 40 hours a week, you may still be legally entitled to health insurance coverage. Whaples finds that among the most important city-level determinants of the workweek during this period were the availability of a pool of agricultural workers, the capital-labor ratio, horsepower per worker, and the amount of employment in large establishments. Eastern European immigrants worked significantly longer than others, as did people in industries whose output varied considerably from season to season. High unionization and strike levels reduced hours to a small degree. The average female employee worked about six and a half fewer hours per week in 1919 than did the average male employee.
In city-level comparisons, state maximum hours laws appear to have had little affect on average work hours, once the influences of other factors have been taken into account. One possibility is that these laws were passed only after economic forces lowered the length of the workweek. Overall, in cities where wages were one percent higher, hours were about -0.13 to -0.05 percent lower. Again, this suggests that during the era of declining hours, workers were willing to use higher wages to "buy" shorter hours.
Historically employers and employees often agreed on very long workweeks because the economy was not very productive (by today's standards) and people had to work long hours to earn enough money to feed, clothe and house their families. The long-term decline in the length of the workweek, in this view, has primarily been due to increased economic productivity, which has yielded higher wages for workers. Workers responded to this rise in potential income by "buying" more leisure time, as well as by buying more goods and services. In a recent survey, a sizeable majority of economic historians agreed with this view.
Over eighty percent accepted the proposition that "the reduction in the length of the workweek in American manufacturing before the Great Depression was primarily due to economic growth and the increased wages it brought" . For example, roughly two-thirds of economic historians surveyed rejected the proposition that the efforts of labor unions were the primary cause of the drop in work hours before the Great Depression. The Middle Class Tax Relief and Job Creation Act of 2012, which has expanded UI "work-sharing" programs to 29 states, provides another way to increase the income of involuntary part-time employees. Work sharing with STC reinforces the built-in, automatic stabilizer role of UI.
Under health care reform in Hawaii, employers must offer health insurance to employees who work more than 20 hours per week. Although more inclusive than the ACA, the Hawaii law was found to have led to an increase in the share of workers working fewer than 20 hours by only 1.4 percent. Indeed, the Massachusetts law, with a much smaller per employee fee ($295) than the ACA, had no discernable effects on either average hours or part-time working .
The suggestion that the "shared responsibility provision" of the Affordable Care Act is behind some of the shift toward part-time work is not supported by the data. The provision requires that certain employers pay a fee if they don't offer a minimum level of health insurance to employees working 30 or more weekly hours. Had these health care–related labor costs prompted employers to reduce more positions to part-time hours, there would be a number of trends in the data that suggest a structural change in involuntary part-time working or hours worked, and these trends do not appear. The most common benefits include health insurance, as well as dental, vision, and life insurance. Employers that offer insurance will usually pay for some (or even all!) of the monthly cost of the policy.
Most full-time employees will also be eligible for paid time off through federal holidays, vacation days, and sick days. Some employers offer their full-time employee's retirement options such as a 401 plan , as well as other company-specific perks such as reimbursements for childcare, a fitness membership, an education stipend and stock options. Much like the number of hours you'll work in a part-time job, the benefits you'll be eligible for will depend on where you work. Many companies choose to only offer benefits—such as dental insurance or a childcare allowance—to full-time employees. Others choose to offer some or all of their benefits to part-time workers as well.
A few of the benefits commonly offered to part-time employees are paid holidays, life insurance, and paid time off , Reynolds says. To illustrate, suppose an employee's hours of work vary each week and the agreement with the employer is that the employee will be paid $480 a week for whatever number of hours of work are required. Under this agreement, the regular rate will vary in overtime weeks.
If the employee works 50 hours, the regular rate is $9.60 ($480 divided by 50 hours). In addition to the salary, half the regular rate, or $4.80, is due for each of the 10 overtime hours, for a total of $528 for the week. If the employee works 60 hours, the regular rate is $8.00 ($480 divided by 60 hours). In that case, an additional $4.00 is due for each of the 20 overtime hours for a total of $560 for the week. As the length of the workweek gradually declined, political agitation for shorter hours seems to have waned for the next two decades.
However, immediately after the Civil War reductions in the length of the workweek reemerged as an important issue for organized labor. Roediger argues that many of the new ideas about shorter hours grew out of the abolitionists' critique of slavery — that long hours, like slavery, stunted aggregate demand in the economy. The leading proponent of this idea, Ira Steward, argued that decreasing the length of the workweek would raise the standard of living of workers by raising their desired consumption levels as their leisure expanded, and by ending unemployment. The hub of the newly launched movement was Boston and Grand Eight Hours Leagues sprang up around the country in 1865 and 1866.
The leaders of the movement called the meeting of the first national organization to unite workers of different trades, the National Labor Union, which met in Baltimore in 1867. The passage of the state laws did foment action by workers — especially in Chicago where parades, a general strike, rioting and martial law ensued. In only a few places did work hours fall after the passage of these laws. Many become disillusioned with the idea of using the government to promote shorter hours and by the late 1860s, efforts to push for a universal eight-hour day had been put on the back burner.
The Fair Labor Standards Act, which sets federal regulations for wages and overtime pay, does not make any distinction between full- and part-time workers. Employees are covered by the law's provisions whether they work 15 hours per week or 50. According to the FLSA, no matter how many hours an employee works, an employer cannot pay less than $7.25 per hour or the applicable state minimum wage. FLSA also sets parameters for employing minors, and these rules are also not affected by whether an employee's schedule meets a minimum number of hours. Zukin and Van Horn advocate for an overtime pay premium for part-time employees that kicks in at relatively fewer hours per week than for full-timers, e.g., at over 35 hours per week, which would further redistribute hours toward the underemployed.
The recent time series trend data examined in this report support the conclusions from the research reviewed above. Indeed, the share of workers working part time involuntarily due to the "inability to find full time" has dropped a bit in 2014 and 2015, after remaining stubbornly high in the recovery. Moreover, the average workweek of part-time workers increased from the recovery through 2015.
Thus, any effects of the ACA have been dwarfed by cyclical forces or other structural changes that appeared prior to 2014. A study by Graham-Squire and Jacobs quantifies how many workers are exposed to the risk that their employers, looking to evade the ACA employer mandate, would reduce workers' hours because they could relatively easily reduce these hours. According to the study this universe includes only workers at large firms that do not currently offer health insurance.
Moreover, they are concentrated in a few industries—retail, restaurants, accommodations, and health care. Thus, Graham-Squire and Jacobs show that the empirical bite of the ACA provisions on involuntary part-time work is likely to be small. If so, full-time work would be the maximum number of hours that an individual could work before becoming eligible for overtime pay . For occupations covered by such provisions, full-time work would be 40 hours per week, in the absence of other indicators. But because "there is no legal definition provided by the Department of Labor for full-time or part-time employment," Reynolds says, each organization will generally set their own. In Muse career coach Jennifer Sukola's experience, people with part time jobs typically work 15 to 29 hours a week.
However, some employers will consider anyone working less than 40 hours a week a part-time employee. When it comes to making decisions about benefits for part-time employees, the number of hours your employees work can dictate eligibility for health insurance and retirement plan options. For otherfringe benefits, employers may have more flexibility to set eligibility requirements. But with morale and engagement on the line for part-time employees, business owners should consider offering employee benefits to their part-time employees.
Employers should be mindful that just because there may be limited statutory impact at the federal level does not rule out the fact that employers may be restricted by state or local laws. Employers should check the laws of the state and local jurisdiction in which they operate for the requirements aroundoffering benefits. Federal wage and hour law doesn't require that employees receive premium pay for working holidays or weekends, unless those hours are actually overtime hours. State and local laws, and/or company policy may dictate whether full-time or part-time employees are paid premium pay for holidays or weekends. The swift reduction of the workweek in the period around World War I has been extensively analyzed by Whaples .
His findings support the consensus that economic growth was the key to reduced work hours. He finds that the rapid economic expansion of the World War I period, which pushed up real wages by more than 18 percent between 1914 and 1919, explains about half of the drop in the length of the workweek. The reduction of immigration during the war was important, as it deprived employers of a group of workers who were willing to put in long hours, explaining about one-fifth of the hours decline. The rapid electrification of manufacturing seems also to have played an important role in reducing the workweek. Increased unionization explains about one-seventh of the reduction, and federal and state legislation and policies that mandated reduced workweeks also had a noticeable role.
The length of the workweek, like other labor market outcomes, is determined by the interaction of the supply and demand for labor. On the other hand, longer hours can bring reduced productivity due to worker fatigue and can bring worker demands for higher hourly wages to compensate for putting in long hours. If they set the workweek too high, workers may quit and few workers will be willing to work for them at a competitive wage rate. Thus, workers implicitly choose among a variety of jobs — some offering shorter hours and lower earnings, others offering longer hours and higher earnings.
What Is A Normal Full Time Work Week If there is a contention of less then 40 hours, an investigation must be made by the insurer to establish the wage under Section 102.11, statutes. A check is made with other employers in the same area where the injured employee worked to find out the number of hours that constitute the normal full-time workweek for the same or similar type of employment. The injured employee's wage is then based on an average of the number of hours that these other full-time employees work. If part-time employees are salaried or paid by some method other than an hourly rate, an hourly rate must be established. This is done by dividing the total earned by the number of hours worked in a pay period. If the employer's records are so incomplete that this cannot be done, a check for the going rate must be made with other employers in the same area, as in Section B on the previous page.
Right to request laws also typically involve a right to request shorter or part-time hours. Thus certain employees would be allowed to request both a floor and a ceiling—effectively a more stable number of weekly hours—and also block out days and times. Employers are simply required to interact with employees to determine if their requested schedule modifications are feasible, and if not, suggest an alternative.
