August 12, 2015
We here at CEPR were glad to see that new research confirms what we had shown earlier, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) did not create a “part-time” nation as many of its opponents warned. In contrast to these studies, our work actually looked at the period when employers would have expected the sanctions to have been in effect, the first six months of 2013.
We did find a small increase in the percentage of workers employed between 25 and 29 hours a week, just under the 30 hours a week cutoff for the sanctions, as the opponents of the bill predicted. However this increase in the share of people working 25-29 hours was due to a reduction in the percentage of people working less than 25 hours a work, not a reduction in the number working more than 30 hours a week. In other words, there was no evidence that employers were shortening workweeks to escape the sanctions in the ACA.
This meant the bad story, that people who needed full-time jobs would only be able to find part-time work, was not true. But there is also a good story, that because people can now get insurance through the exchanges, many people will opt to work fewer hours at jobs that don’t provide health insurance. This is likely to be the case with many parents with young children and possibly among older pre-Medicare age workers who might find it difficult to work full time jobs.
We used the Current Population Survey (CPS) to examine the change in voluntary part-time employment between 2013 and 2014, the first year the exchanges were operating. We found a large increase in the number of young parents (the CPS only gives ages of the parents, not the children) who were choosing to work part-time. We also found an increase in the number of older workers, especially women, who were voluntarily working part-time.
In short, our takeaway is that the ACA is not taking away full-time jobs from people who need them, but it is giving many people an option to work part-time that they did not previously have. That looks like a pretty good deal.
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