The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, mandating any employee working over 30 hours per week be provided health insurance, has begun to affect the ability of numerous Adjunct faculty to continue teaching. Most higher education institutions cannot afford to extend health care to adjuncts now becoming eligible, in January 2014, when the Act goes into effect. Some schools have simply and aggressively cut the number of hours adjuncts are allowed to work per week as a preemptive measure to avoid future fines. Many adjuncts teach only a class or two outside of full time careers and so will not be unsettled by any across-the-board restrictions to their program. But those who depend on teaching to pay the bills are becoming casualties of an Act aimed at the general state of healthcare.

Most adjuncts agree that not being offered health care is less an important an issue to their livelihood as is a drastic reduction in the number of hours they are allowed to work. And more and more the education system relies more heavily on adjuncts with each passing year. The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Adjunct Project found that the percentage of adjuncts teaching in the United States between the years of 1975 to 2009 grew from 43 percent to 70 percent of all teachers. Thus some institutions and adjuncts hope that the Internal Revenue Service will create an exemption remedying this administrative predicament when they move to finalize the Act’s regulations regarding part time workers. For now, the only advice offered by the IRS is for employers to “use a reasonable method for crediting hours of service” going further to say that all hours necessary to perform the employee’s full duties as a teacher, not just classroom or instruction time, should be taken into account.

It is, perhaps, good timing that some adjuncts are beginning to unionize. The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) began regional organizing campaigns aimed at unionizing adjuncts from enough area colleges to gain momentum in order to pressure institutions to improve adjuncts' pay, benefits, and working conditions. The campaign in the Washington, DC area has been highly successful. With the addition of Georgetown University’s part-time staff, which overwhelmingly voted in favor of forming a union, SEIU now represents over three-fourths of the adjunct faculty in the greater metropolitan area. With the “29 Hour Rule” looming, unionized adjunct forces might have a better chance in making sure their interests are represented as the Internal Revenue Service moves forward in finalizing the Acts regulations regarding part time workers.

For more information: http://chronicle.com/article/Georgetown-U-Adjuncts-Vote-to/139069/ ;

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