Obamacare has not yet turned America into a nation of part-time workers, as many of its strongest critics have long said it would.
In fact, the opposite seems to be happening, according to new government numbers published Friday: The number of part-time jobs is actually shrinking, and full-time jobs are being created instead.
Specifically, the number of part-time workers in the U.S. fell in February to about 27.3 million, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on Friday. That number is down by about 300,000 since March 2010, when the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, became law.
Meanwhile, the ranks of full-time workers have grown by more than 2 million within the past year to 117.8 million in February. The number of part-time workers fell by about 230,000 over that period.
Republicans argue that Obamacare’s decree that businesses must give full-time workers health-care coverage will cause a bunch of jobs to switch from full-time to part-time. And a handful of employers have actually cut worker hours because of Obamacare.
But the majority of those cutting hours are in the struggling public sector — state and local governments. In the private sector, the chief financial officers of 500 companies recently said that Obamacare will have a limited impact on their hiring decisions.
