Roby Highlights Alabama Employer in Committee Hearing

During a House Education and the Workforce Committee hearing, U.S. Representative Martha Roby questioned Department of Labor (DOL) Secretary Hilda Solis about troubling regulatory actions affecting small businesses across the country. Sec. Solis appeared before members of the Education and the Workforce Committee during a hearing examining the DOL’s budget and policy priorities for FY2013.

At the hearing, Roby illustrated an Alabama employer who would be forced to close several businesses in order to comply with imposing regulations instituted through the health care law. Roby asked Sec. Solis to explain how the health care law could spur job creation when it was, in fact, discouraging businesses from hiring new employees.

Excerpts from Roby’s questions to Sec. Solis regarding the impact of the health care law on job creation are provided below:

“Madame Secretary, as the secretary you have an opinion on whether or not that threshold and that penalty will help job creators – because certainly it would not. We know that this is going to cause these small businesses to in some instances to have to close their doors.

“Different businesses have different overhead costs and when you add the cost of the health care mandate on top of that, it is going to severely hurt small business job creation throughout the country.

“If the employer cannot afford, on its bottom line, to cover those individuals then they’re going to pay the penalty. But in order to get out from under the penalty they’re not going to add more jobs so that they can stay under that 50 employer threshold. That is the point, that it [the health care mandate] is not an incentive to small business creation.”