Whole Foods CEO John Mackey says Obamacare is forcing his company to hire more part-timers.
The company has historically had a 75-percent full-time workforce, Mackey said Wednesday on Fox News Channel’s “Your World with Neil Cavuto,” but next year that will drop to 70 percent.
If expenses continue to rise, he said, the percentage may drop even lower.
Mackey said his employees are likely to see depressed wage increases or higher out-of-pocket expenses as the company seeks to make up for the extra money it’s being charged for coverage mandated by the Affordable Care Act. Whole Foods self-insures.
Guest host Stuart Varney told Mackey he sounded like a libertarian.
“I’m a conscious capitalist, I believe in capitalism,” Mackey said. “I believe free markets are the best way to organize society, and any system that supports capitalism I’m in favor of.”
Mackey in January warned that Obamacare wasn’t socialist as he had said previously, but fascist, because the government doesn’t own the means of production, though it controls them.
As Obamacare was being debated in 2009, Mackey wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal with his own suggestions for healthcare reform.
“Unfortunately, none of those suggestions have been implemented.” Mackey said Wednesday.