Darden Restaurants is a large chain which operates Olive Garden, Red Lobster and LongHorn Steakhouse restaurants. At a select number of stores they are instituting a "test" to limit employees to 28 hours per week in order to skirt the Affordable Care Act's requirement that they offer health insurance coverage to full-time employees.

The Urban Institute's recent study* showed Darden and similarly sized companies would only see a slight increase in their operating costs due to the ACA, yet Darden is using it as an excuse to pay their employees less. This is after instituting a Tip-share program last year. Tip-sharing is an unfair practice which takes gratuities away from servers and splits them among all restaurant employees. Tip sharing is done to avoid paying the federal minimum wage to employees in non-server petitions. Servers earn gratuities and their gratuities are taken from them. It boils down to the servers having to pay wages to the kitchen staff so that the company can save money.

For more information on this issue, please visit:
http://gawker.com/5950331/olive-garden-red-lobster-scale-back-employee-work-hours-to-avoid-paying-for-health-insurance

*- visit http://thinkprogress.org/health/2012/10/09/979101/study-obamacare-reduces-costs-for-small-businesses/ to see the Urban Institute study results