FACT-CHECKING SENATOR KAMALA HARRIS …
In the second Democratic primary candidate debate of the 2020 presidential campaign on June 27, Senator Kamala Harris discounted Trump’s strong record of employment growth by claiming that people are being forced to work multiple jobs.
We fact checked her claim and here’s what we found …
The share of employed people working multiple jobs is currently at 5.1% — down from highs of 6.4% in 4Q96 and 5.5% and 5.4% in the past two recessions, and up from lows of 4.7% in 4Q13 and 2Q15.
As recently written on Breitbart, the current share of 5.1% is actually an impressive number, “because overall employment is at a record high and unemployment much lower. The seasonally-adjusted unemployment rate in November 2013, for example, was 6.6 percent. Today it is 3.7 percent. So when the record low share of multiple job holders were being set during Obama’s presidency, there were far more people unemployed alongside those holding multiple jobs. The labor market was just worse for workers.“
However, we agree with Senator Harris that the trend line for the share of employees working multiple jobs has been steadily, though modestly, increasing (i.e., getting worse) since 2015.
We believe we know why … and it has nothing to do with Trump’s economic policies.
On 23 March 2010, President Obama signed into law the Affordable Health Care for America Act (ACA).
The ACA mandated that employers with 50 or more full-time equivalent employees must offer their full-time workers ACA-compliant health coverage or else risk a substantial financial penalty. If you are an employer with a predominately variable-hour workforce, the IRS defines a full-time employee for any calendar month as “an employee employed on average at least 30 hours of service per week, or 130 hours of service per month.” The first year that the mandate took effect was 2015.
In July 2017, MarketWatch reported that the ACA had caused small businesses to eliminate hundreds of thousands of full-time jobs to avoid the Obamacare mandate. The following research was cited in their reporting:
- House Committee on Energy and Commerce – March 2013: The new law will reduce employment in America, particularly for low-skill workers, because employers face a higher cost of labor.
- Congressional Budget Office (CBO) – February 2014: The CBO projects a decline in the number of full-time-equivalent workers of about 2.0 million in 2017, rising to about 2.5 million in 2024.
- National Bureau of Economic Research – October 2014: Between 28,000 and 50,000 businesses appear to have reduced their number of full-time employees from 2014 to 2016 because of the ACA employer mandate.
- Upjohn Institute and Vanderbilt University – June 2016: There have been 500,000 workers in the retail, hospitality and food service sectors who were forced involuntarily into part-time employment as companies sought to circumvent the employer mandate.
- Goldman Sachs – June 2016: We would estimate that 300,000 workers might be working part-time involuntarily as a result of the Affordable Care Act.
People’s bills don’t change when they lose their full-time employment, so it’s no wonder some have been trying to cope by earning comparable income in multiple part-time jobs.
CONCLUSION
Senator Kamala Harris is wrong in asserting that Trump’s economic policies are forcing more people to work multiple jobs. If anything is to blame for the modest uptick in multiple jobholders since 2015, it is her Democratic Party’s passage (without any Republican votes) of Obamacare and its full-time job killing employer mandate.