Inside Music MediaJerry Del Colliano

If there has been a boom in radio hiring, it has been by making formerly full-time employees part-time.

And hiring part-timers instead of full-timers after layoffs.

All employers will be subject to the new rules that may act as an incentive to either raise unlivable salaries or get someone else fired.

And all radio companies will be affected however iHeart and Cumulus being the largest employers will potentially be the most destabilizing because of the sheer numbers alone.

And all the other radio groups wind up doing what they do.

For example, the backbone of iHeart are employees making between $23,000 and $51,000 a year and most newsrooms and board ops work well over 40 hours a week.

Could radio employers be adding bodies?

Or find some way around it off the clock?

One of the unintended consequences of conducting so many layoffs was that hourly radio workers racked up too much overtime to pick up the workload.

What to do – fire them, pay a few and fire the others, cut benefits or worse? There are six major changes based on the new law.

The effective date of the part-time employee law is coming up quickly – December 1^st.

That’s why it’s urgent to know what radio groups have to do to comply and what they are likely to do because it affects so many of their employees.

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