Lost of all benefits due to boss reducing me from full time to part time.

[kcwillia37]

What is the name of your state (only U.S. law)? Washington

I’ve worked for this corporation for over 4 years now since they first opened for business. I was hired on as a Full Time employee. They consider 30 hours to be full time. I’ve received medical, dental and vacation benefits.

I work in the food and beverage department for this establishment. There are two restaurants. One is open 7am-11am (buffet), 5pm-10pm (menu), the other is 11am-11pm. We have approx 40 servers, whom which majority have an established restaurant they work at as well as hours. Meaning the lunch servers don’t work breakfast or dinner. Dinner servers don’t work breakfast type thing.
I am probably 1 out of maybe 5 of all the servers who is experienced and can work both restaurants, any times since I’ve been there since day one.
I spent the first 2 years working dinner shifts only with occasionally picking up breakfast and lunch shifts when someone called out and they had no one to cover.
I switched from Dinner to breakfast two years ago and have been scheduled and working solely breakfast shifts since then, again with the occasional pickup of other shifts when they needed.

We are a family amusement park where majority of our clientele are families with children. We have certain downtimes throughout the year. Which I’ve gotten used to over the years.
When we are busy I can be scheduled 5-6 days a week receiving approx. 25hrs. When we are slow, I can get scheduled 1-2 days a week and only get 10hrs if im lucky.
There has been talk here and there over the years about if we don’t maintain our hours we could lose our benefits. But the periods Ive gone through being scheduled 10hrs a week for a month or two straight has never affected my status.



So today my manager informed me (coming from HR), she is dropping my status of full time to part time because I haven’t maintained 30hrs a week for the last 14 weeks. I will lose all my benefits at the end of this month. I never received any notice or warning about this from my management or HR prior.

I have no control over how much I’m schedule. I brought it to the head of HR today the fact that there are only a handful of Full Time employees, the rest are Part Time, and it doesn’t help that the P/T employees are being scheduled as many hours as F/T. If there was some policy enforced that Full Time employees received available hours and shifts first and the P/T employees got what remained available, I wouldn’t be in the position I am now. The head of HR told me that she advised my manager to do this, but she can’t “patrol” how my manager schedules.

Now I don’t know what to do from here. I feel like this is really unfair. I really depended on my medical insurance for my medical conditions and medications (that have absolutely no effect on my job in any way).
I checked today and it will cost me double the pay to get medical insurance outside of work, and still doesn’t even compare to what I was getting.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.


Also, Does it make any difference if some of my other full time coworkers did not meet the require hours as well, and their statuses were not dropped and they did not lose their benefits??

 

[cbg]

Unfair is not illegal. Unless you have a legally binding and enforceable contract that guarantees you full time status, your boss is free to drop you to part time. They are not required to provide you with notice or warning.

 

[OHRoadwarrior]

I suggest you utilize COBRA until you make other arrangements. You may need to prompt HR to obtain this timely. It will prevent a pre-existing issue from happening.

 

[LdiJ]

Unfair is not illegal. Unless you have a legally binding and enforceable contract that guarantees you full time status, your boss is free to drop you to part time. They are not required to provide you with notice or warning.

I actually think that there is some room for disagreement here. When it comes to benefits and who qualifies for them an employer is supposed to have a set policy that applies to all employees. If there are other employees who are maintaining their benefits working less than 30 hours, then its a problem if only one employee is singled out.

However, I would suspect that either one of two things is happening here...that either the employer is feeling an economic pinch and therefore will, over the course of the next week or so drop benefits from all employees working less than 30 hours a week, OR, this manager doesn't like this employee and is hoping that the employee will quit.

 

[commentator]

OR that the employer is being frightened by prospect of the new health care laws and is trying to cope by slashing benefits for all employees. There's some amazing misinformation floating around out there in the employer community. Does this OP know that they are the ONLY employee this has happened to? Calling 30 hours full time for the purpose of giving benefits is pretty generous. Does your failure to have worked full time have anything to do with your choice? Did you always work the hours they offered you if they were available?

They might be trying to let you know that you won't be carried working less hours now by your choice if this is the case. But in any case, providing benefits for employees has always been a situation that is fairly discretionary. The employer actually determines who works full or part time, in this case is picking the definition of full time for receiving benefits generously. Thus they have a very easy way to determine who does and doesn't get benefits if they want to enforce their own policies.

IF the employee could show that they were singled out for an EEOC related reason and denied the same level of benefit coverage as the other employees, that might make an issue, but otherwise I think it's pretty much in the employer's control.

I hope this person has been signing up and receiving their unemployment insurance for any week that they make less in gross wages than they are eligible for in unemployment insurance. These sort of sometimes part time and seasonal businesses were the bane of our existance in unemployment insurance circles. And no, you can't agree with them that you'll not sign up for unemployment benefits if they continue your health insurance through the winter, like some enterprising entrepreneurs tried to make happen.

 

[cbg]

I'm not reading it that other employees are being allowed to maintain less than 30 hours and keep their benefits. Where are you seeing that?

 

[LdiJ]

I'm not reading it that other employees are being allowed to maintain less than 30 hours and keep their benefits. Where are you seeing that?

Last paragraph, first post. Might have been edited in after you originally read the first post.

 

[cbg]

In that case, yes, it MIGHT make a difference. But it would depend on why.