(This post is a follow-Up to Behind the Headlines: Thousands of Amazon Workers Collect Food Stamps!)
A few days ago, Bernie Sanders introduced a bill -the Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies (Stop BEZOS) Act - that would impose a tax on companies with 500 or more employees “equal to the amount of federal benefits received by their low wage workers.” Per the Bill (link here):
For the purpose of the Act, an employee is: any full-time or part-time employee, any individual who is a full-time or part-time independent contractor [including franchise employee], unless—
‘‘(A) the individual is free from control and direction in connection with the performance of the service, both under the contract for the performance of service and in fact, ‘‘(B) the service is performed outside the usual course of the business of the employer, and ‘‘(C) the individual is customarily engaged in an independently established trade, occupation, profession, or business of the same nature as that involved in the service performed, and ‘‘(3) any individual who is a full-time or part-time joint employee, provided that the employer possess, reserves, or exercises sufficient direct or indirect control over the essential terms and conditions of employment of such employee contractor.
The Act makes no allowance for whether the employee chooses to work part-time only, nor does it address situations where the benefit eligibility period only partly overlaps with dates of employment. So how would this work out in the real world? Let’s take the case of an Amazon employee who receives food stamps, i.e., SNAP benefits. Here are SNAP’s gross income eligibility standards for Fiscal Year 2018:
Let’s take a single mom with 3 kids (household size = 4) who doesn't want to work more than 20 hours a week. According to the above table, she would be eligible for food stamps if she earned $30/hour working 20 hours/week. However, if one of her parents were disabled, filed taxes separately, and lived with the family*, the gross income eligibility standard would be $3383/month. This means she would still qualify for food stamps working 20 hours a week at a gross wage of $39 an hour. And Amazon would still have pay 100% taxes for the cost of the family's food stamps on top of $780 a week for a part-time employee – who chooses to work part-time, even though full-time work is available.
Does this make sense to you? Should employers quiz prospective employees on the size of their household to determine how much they should pay them? Would single moms be less likely to get a job offer?
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* This is per a different table, “Gross Monthly Income Eligibility Standards for Households Where Elderly Disabled Are a Separate Household”