How the ACA is Affecting the Staffing Business

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) has affected individuals tremendously since the federal healthcare exchange had it’s (less than stellar) rollout in October.

The employer portion of the ACA will be going into effect in January and staffing firms will be affected in ways both similar and different from our client companies.

Come January, businesses with more than 50 full-time employees will be required to provide affordable healthcare to those workers. This could well mean that smaller companies – those with full-time payroll employees near 50 in number – may turn to companies such as Arrow Staffing.

for temporary and/or part-time workers in order to avoid this requirement.

Some of our larger staffing colleagues think the employer mandate of the ACA will have little, if any effect, on their business. However, when taking a look at Massachusetts (which passed a law similar to the ACA within the commonwealth in 2006), staffing firms there found that the demand for temporary workers increased by about six fold.

There’s been some confusion regarding how the ACA will affect larger staffing firms across the country. The final employer mandate regulations (published in February) changed some of the provisions regarding how rules will apply in 2015, most notably, a change in the definition of what constitutes a “large employer.” According to the American Staffing Association, the new and final rules “confirm that staffing firms can apply a ‘look-back’ measurement period to determine the full-time status of new ‘variable-hour’ employees and includes new temporary staffing-specific factors for making those determinations.”

Because the employer portion of the ACA won’t begin until January, we won’t know for certain how the ACA will affect all employers, including staffing companies. And, even though the February ACA ruling is supposed to be the “final” ruling, experts within the staffing industry expect there still may be changes to the employer mandate before January 2015 – and beyond.
If your small- to mid-sized Inland Empire company is looking to mitigate the effect of the ACA’s employer provisions, contact Arrow Staffing: we may be able to help by providing you full-time temporary employees (workers who remain on our payroll, not yours). We look forward to hearing from you.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *