29-hour work week a misguided directive

Shane Wade
Opinion Editor

For hourly employees, there’s a big difference between a 29-hour work week and a 30-hour work week. Unfortunately, Gov. Bob McDonnell doesn’t understand that or the struggles of the working class.

McDonnell recently announced a directive calling for all state agencies to limit the workload of hourly employees to 29 hours per week. The directive circumvents the federal Affordable Care Act (ACA), which mandates that all state agencies or businesses with more than 50 employees provide health insurance to those who work at least 30 hours per week.

Not only were agencies provided an inadequate amount of time to prepare for the changes, this action is and should be known as one of the most mishandled and self-serving executive actions McDonnell ever enacted.

In seeking to express an opposition to a section of the mandate that would negatively impact small to medium-sized businesses, he robs more than 37,000 hourly state employees from achieving a higher standard of living. The directive is ultimately a misguided attempt to make a statement about the ACA.

Fears about the cost of implementing the policy are less distressing when you realize that providing the benefits guaranteed by the act would cost Virginia around $110 million annually and, according to McDonnell himself, Virginia had a $448.5 million budget surplus for the fiscal year of 2012.

Wage employees across the state of Virginia, including student workers here at VCU, will be negatively affected.

As reported in the Commonwealth Times, there are about 300 adjunct professors here at VCU. They already work for relatively low wages and now they’ll have to adjust for a stricter work schedule and a decreased amount of reportable time.

Students are already stretched by VCU’s increasing tuition, monthly student loan payments and the costs of living. Full-time students cannot be expected to become full-time workers. They also can’t afford to work less hours and be paid less.

If VCU is to be academically triumphed, students will need time to properly address their studies, as well as participate in extracurricular activities. The proposed $52 million expansion to Cabell Library will mean nothing and be a waste if VCU cannot or refuses to pony up the additional $10 million per year to pay for our wage employees.

It was manipulative and callous of McDonnell to activate a backdoor initiative to circumvent the federal mandate and dupe state employees out of their chance to get health care.

While the initial cost of the ACA are high in order to help subsidize health insurance costs, there are tangible losses to these sorts of workplace reductions, including effects on employee morale, workplace productivity and retention and recruitment.

Fifteen percent of Virginia residents under 65 don’t have health insurance, according to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s County Health Rankings.

That 15 percent could greatly benefit from having health insurance. The state could have benefitted if a larger percentage of the population had health care coverage and didn’t treat the emergency room as their primary health provider.

The 29-hour work week directive is more likely to beget an increased number of non-emergency Emergency Response visits, Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program requests and other social safety net programs.

Neither the ACA nor our current healthcare system is the solution to the massive health care inefficiencies in America; they don’t incentivize individuals to be healthier, there’s too many bureaucratic inefficiencies involved in pharmaceuticals and the consumer doesn’t have adequate choices. The response, however, should not be a sudden, damaging directive aimed at workers.

State institution executives, including university presidents, must make McDonnell understand how destructive his narrow-minded world view is. They need to speak truth to power and protect Virginians.

The people need a voice that advocates for the public and the middle class, not corporations or political parties.