What do you mean by "merge" them? Have two employees (more accurately, 4 part-time 29.5-hour employees doing the work of 3 full-time 40-hour employees) share be

What do you mean by "merge" them? Have two employees (more accurately, 4 part-time 29.5-hour employees doing the work of 3 full-time 40-hour employees) share benefits: "You get health insurance this month and I get it next month, you can contribute to your 401k this month and I can next month" kind of thing? Or prohibit you from hiring more than 3 'unnecessary' part-time employees? I'm abundantly familiar with the sort of antics that are involved. For another example, my wife used to work in childcare. To cover 8 classrooms Monday to Friday from 7:30 to 5:30 with at least one lead and one aide, plus two floaters (900 hours per week) they employed approximately 36 part-time workers (several were high school/college study programs working 16 or 24 hours per week) and no full-time workers. You're suggesting that they should be mandated to instead hire 24 full-time workers and pay benefits? In actuality, every teacher and aide except the owners used to be mandated to work no more than 29.5 hours per week. You often had short stints of working from after nap time at 2pm to 5:30pm just so that you could make hours (which sucked when she was driving 30 minutes at 16mpg to make $10.75/hour with gas at $4/gallon). Some people got scheduled mornings, some got afternoons, but you didn't dare come in for a full day because then they'd have to give benefits. It was amazing how paranoid and irate the front office would get at 5:31pm when couple parents were late for pick-up and they had to keep staff around for more than their scheduled hours. If anyone hit more than 30 hours, they'd shuffle the schedule so they were no longer working afternoon shifts that might go long, and this was all complicated by frequently requested shift trades among the underpaid and underemployed people involved; you weren't allowed to cover for anyone if you'd gone over 30 hours in any of the previous 4 weeks. And it was a nightmare for anyone who tried to have a second job that might need you between 7:30 and 5:30, you wouldn't know for sure until Friday night what you'd be asked to work Monday morning. And they weren't just turning screws in a factory, this also had negative effects on the kids they were teaching when they'd wake up from nap time to find a relative stranger watching them. Given the demographic, they much preferred shuffling around colorful magnets on a calendar to spreadsheets or databases, and there was a lot of shuffling indeed. But I'd hate to imagine what it would be like to code an automated time clock for that byzantine system...it would be generous to call it a game.