Walmart, the nation’s largest private employer and
the world’s biggest retailer plans to begin denying health insurance to
newly hired employees who work fewer than 30 hours a week, according to
a copy of the company’s policy obtained by The Huffington Post.
The
online news outlet reports that under the policy, set to take effect in
January, Walmart also reserves the right to eliminate health care
coverage for certain workers if their average workweek dips below 30
hours, something the report says happens with regularity and at the
direction of company managers.
Walmart did not disclose how many
of its roughly 1.4 million U.S. workers are vulnerable to losing medical
insurance under its new policy and in an emailed statement a company
spokesman said Walmart had “made a business decision” not to respond to
questions from The Huffington Post, accusing the publication of unfair
coverage.
The paper reported that labor and health care experts
portrayed Walmart’s decision to exclude workers from its medical plans
“as an attempt to limit costs while taking advantage of the national
health care reform known as Obamacare. Among the key features of
Obamacare is an expansion of Medicaid, the taxpayer-financed health
insurance program for poor people. Many of the Walmart workers who might
be dropped from the company’s health care plans earn so little that
they would qualify for the expanded Medicaid program, these experts
said.”
Ken Jacobs, chairman of the Labor Research Center at the
University of California, Berkeley told the newspaper that, “Walmart is
effectively shifting the costs of paying for its employees onto the
federal government with this new plan, which is one of the problems with
the way the law is structured.”
The report noted that because of
Walmart’s huge size and its massive number of employees, the company’s
policies tend to influence American working conditions more broadly and
that other companies are now crafting similar policies that will exclude
some part-time workers from medical coverage.
source
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Tying healthcare to the employer unduly empowers the employer over the employee, thus directly placing the health and well being of the employee in the hands of the employer (usually large corporations like Wallmart owned and controlled by the top 1% of the country).
Such a system artificially perpetuates a relationship of master and slave (where the employer or top 1% of the country is the master and the employee is the slave), a condition well known to us from American history, as slavery.
My apologies for the delay in posting your comment.
Post a Comment