The Disney-owned website FiveThirtyEight, best known for its election predictions and sports analysis, is hiring a slate of economics and personal finance writers who can work no more than 29 hours per week. Exactly 29 hours. No more.
It might seem incredibly specific, 29 hours, but there are a number of national employers looking for employees to fill the same part-time schedule. The new workforce subset, known as “twenty-niners” is a phenomenon three years in the making, and only now taking hold with major corporations.
In 2012, economists predicted the shift to the 29-hour work week largely because the Affordable Care Act (or “Obamacare”) defined “full time work” as 30 hours per week for a mid-sized organization with 50 employees or more. Once employees hit 30 hours, businesses are required to provide them with health care as part of their benefits packages, or they risk a fine from the IRS.
Since health care has gotten more expensive – health care premiums have skyrocketed more than 33% in some states – fewer employers can afford to provide health care benefits. And even if they can — as one would expect to be the case with Disney — they don’t want to. Hence FiveThirtyEight’s new job posting: “This is a part-time staff position (up to 29 hours per week) and does not offer benefits.”
Prager University released a video on the phenomenon earlier this month:
The theory seems to play out when you look at employment trends. While full-time (salaried, 40+ hours per week) employment has remained steady or grown, part-time employment of more than 30 hours has declined. Part time employment of less than 30 hours has grown from 9.7% of part-time workers to 11.1% of part-time workers in just under three years.
Young people and women are most likely to fall under the 29-hour threshold, which also means that Obamacare may be indirectly responsible for increasing the workplace wage gap between women and men. The “twenty-niners,” as a group, is likely to grow even larger as health insurance premiums increase in 2017, and more insurance companies drop out of the marketplace.
As for the FiveThirtyEight, “This is a job for a reporter; if your first instinct when you come across a new subject is to pick up the phone, this position could be right for you.”
Just not a job for a reporter who needs health care.