Here’s a question for you: am I wrong to say that companies that care only about profits, and not about employees, are assholes? Before you answer: no I am not. Companies that care only about profits, and not about employees, are assholes. This is at the core of my hatred of the existence of corporations. I think we should make them illegal. I realize this would be hugely disruptive, but unlike free trade agreements, getting rid of the corporation would have great long-term benefits.
Thus it is with Darden Restaurants. It is the corporation that owns Red Lobster and Olive Garden. Typical of the anti-human thinking of a corporation, it decided to look into the possibility of making all their employees full time so that they wouldn’t have to provide them with healthcare. All they would have had to do was contact the “people” at Walmart who are experts at keeping employees just below the number of hours they need to get healthcare.
This is typical of how corporations not only screw their employees, but also the government. Under Obamacare, those part-time Darden employees will still have to get insurance. And almost certainly they will not make enough to buy it themselves. Thus the government will pay for what (in our fucked up society) is an employer’s responsibility. So we all pay higher taxes, the people eating at Red Lobster get slightly lower prices, and the Darden owners make more money.
This is not free market capitalism!
There is good news, however. The word got out about Darden’s evil plan and there was a backlash against it. Sarah Kliff reported earlier this week, “Darden Restaurants, the company that owns Olive Garden and Red Lobster, revised earning projection downwards today.”
Yesterday, she reported on how it is hard for companies to do this kind of thing. If hundreds of chains did it, where would people go for their disappointing dining experiences? But I think there is something important here that she doesn’t acknowledge: companies will continue to work to get around the law, just not in a wholesale way.
And this is another problem with the twisted compromise that is Obamacare. By withholding one extra hour of work from an employee, a manager will be able to save a thousand bucks. And so managers everywhere will do it. It would have been best for employees and the businesses they work for to have had a single payer system. But of course, we couldn’t have that because there was one industry that would have been harmed. It is like reverse Christianity: we all suffer for the sins of the insurance industry.
