... a-n-d part-time workers do not need to be paid benefits. As a full-time worker, I am paid again 25% of my wages in additional benefits, including retirement contributions and full health insurance. If I work more than 40 hours per week as overtime, I get paid at 1.5 my hourly rate. In contrast, the four half-time positions that my company just posted do not include benefits for the same work I do. Read it again: four positions, or the equivalent of two full-time people, will save my employer from paying benefits and overtime to those workers.
Well there should be no such thing as benefits, they are a distortion on the market created by the State's meddling. The first thing to realize is that if you get benefits, they are coming out of your wages. Because your employer calculates the cost of those benefits when they decide to employ you. And it would be the same for them to pay that amount of money to you directly, or to pay it in benefits. Hence they offer you a lower wage with the benefits. Many people would prefer to be paid the extra money instead, but because of State intervention and meddling, that's either illegal or inconvenient in many cases.
Many of these benefits are simply tax loopholes, because the State charges taxes on your salary/wages, but not on things like health insurance or 401k contributions. However, things are not so simple. Health insurance is also a subsidy for the medical industry, and it is also a means of keeping people sick and dependent, and addicted to medical drugs. I'm guessing most people in this forum who live in the US would rather not have medical insurance, and have the extra money instead. The 401k and other retirement plans are problematic because they restrict your options as far as investment opportunities, but they are a benefit in that you only pay taxes on that money when you withdraw it, and not year to year as you're making it, meaning if your investment plan yields a profit that compounds over the years, the final number will be much larger than if you had to pay the tax on that year to year. But of course, there's always the possibility that when social security is finally recognized as being broke, they will simply expropriate private retirement accounts and use that to fund social security for the masses. They've done that in Argentina twice, and while I'm not saying they will do it for sure in the US, it's a possibility. Or perhaps they could simply increase taxes to 90% and so you really only get 10% of the money in your retirement account when you try to spend it.
It would be much better to remove these loopholes and mandated insurance/contributions, and simply reduce (or better yet, eliminate) the taxes associated with labor. Part of the reason why health care is so expensive in the US is because it's mandatory to pay for it. That guarantees the health insurance agencies (or the State, with the public option) a lot of customers without having to offer them a good service for a good price. Social security was always and in every country introduced by politicians who believed that the masses were too stupid to be trusted to save for their own retirement, so the government would do it for them. And in every case, these State-mandated retirement systems have gone bust as the State spends more than they take in, and because of inflation wiping away the value of the contributions over the years. So nowadays in all of the world the situation is such that social security acts simply as a tax on the working population, that is used to finance the payments to the retired.
Curiously, my company is constantly understaffed; even in a poor economy, it's hard to find workers who are both qualified and willing to work here. That is another factor that has to be figured in to unemployment figures - prima donna job-seekers who want their ideal job or no job at all. This includes older displaced workers who want to earn what they earned in their prime and recent graduates who reckon that their 4-year degree qualifies them to start at the top.
Well the State is offering huge unemployment benefits, food stamps, and other freebies to encourage people not to work. Of course, the "freebies" aren't really free, the State must tax the productive class in order to subsidize the unproductive. Also, all of these distortions in the labor market make it so that businesses would rather not have to hire more people, even if they would otherwise benefit from doing so. They'd rather be understaffed than being overstaffed and having to deal with the uncertainty of the situation.
And I didn't even get into the crazy laws regarding "worker's rights", where apparently just because someone is an employer, they've lost all their rights, and just because someone is a worker, it means they have the "right" to rob their employers blind. Discrimination lawsuits and "wrongful termination" are particularly insane and destructive. Hiring someone is always a risk, but when the State makes it illegal to fire them, and makes it so that they can sue you at whim for no reason at all and take you for all you're worth, it's an unreasonable risk. At that point it's better to try your best to avoid having to hire people.
