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Adjuncts now at risk due to new healthcare law’s insurance requirement?

Brian Leiter

A philosopher writes:

I wonder if the issue addressed in this Chronicle article might merit discussion on your blog.

I'm the assistant chair of a philosophy department at a very poorly funded public commuter school that has been using adjuncts as de facto full-time faculty for years now. Our administration has just told us that we may have to throw a bunch of these people out on the street as early as the beginning of summer so that we won't have to pay for their health insurance.  I'd be curious to know whether fellow philosophers elsewhere in the country might be going through a similar ordeal, and what strategies they've been adopting for dealing with it.

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12 responses to “Adjuncts now at risk due to new healthcare law’s insurance requirement?”

  1. Paul Kelleher

    I am not expert in these matters. But I'm somewhat familiar with the considerations at issue here, and I believe the following is accurate. ACA's employer mandate requires that large employers (employers with 50 or more full-time employees/full-time FTEs) provide affordable health insurance to all of its *full-time employees*, or else pay a penalty. The penalty is variable depending on the circumstances, but it can be between $2000 and $3000 *per full-time employee/FTE*. That is, if even one full-time employee is not offered affordable insurance ("affordabililty" is also defined by the regulations), then large employers must pay a penalty for each full-time employee/FTE it employs (with the first 30 employees exempted).

    Note that FTEs are only relevant for the purposes of determining whether an employer is a "large employer." Employers will *not* be assessed penalties if they do not provide insurance to their non-full-time employees. 30 hours/week is the threshold for being considered a full-time employee.

    Again, I'm not a lawyer, but based on all this, I'd expect Universities who depend on adjuncts to start making it very clear that adjuncts are to work no more than 30 hours per week. Whether that will match the adjunct's lived experience is perhaps another matter.

    The IRS has issued proposed regulations providing guidance on determining whether adjuncts are above or below this threshold (http://www.irs.gov/pub/newsroom/reg-138006-12.pdf). As I read it, the guidance is still rather vague, with IRS saying that it may make things more clear at a later date. These regulations have gone through their comment period, and a final hearing was apparently scheduled for April 23 (yesterday). The issue of adjuncts is addressed on pp. 30-32.

    Reply
  2. Mark

    I had my course load for this summer abruptly reduced by half and this was cited as the reason. The "30-hour" thing was cited, though the total hours for the courses do not nearly add up to 30-hours per week (apparently there is some formula that includes out of class time). I am in Florida (public commuter college).

    Reply
  3. John

    Here is a (gated) WSJ article on the topic:

    http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323635504578213502177768898.html

    And here is a non-gated discussion from The Daily Beast:

    http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/01/14/are-adjuncts-full-time-employees.html

    My takeaway is that this is a real issue, but that there is also a real chance a "fix" (if that's how you view it) will be amended to the bill.

    Reply
  4. Katrina

    My small liberal arts college has informed Chairs of departments that they are interpreting the new rules to mean that we might owe benefits to any adjunct who teaches more than four courses in a calendar year. I was thus asked to tell two of my adjuncts that they can not teach in fall of 2013 because they taught four courses over our 2013 January and Spring terms. I have repeatedly asked for a lecturer position (with a heavy teaching load but no service or scholarship requirements, that would have benefits) as a solution to our overuse of adjuncts, but my requests have been denied. It seems that in response to the new requirements of Obamacare the college wants me to find more adjuncts who will be offered less courses.

    Reply
  5. Justin Fisher

    As far as I know, the Affordable Care Act provides three ways of helping part-time employees get insurance:

    (1) Many part-time employees (including many adjuncts) will have income low enough that they will qualify for government subsidies to help buy insurance.

    (2) The Act tells states (or the feds if states refuse, as many have) to set up insurance exchanges, which ideally will provide better choices for individuals/families to buy their own insurance. It remains to be seen how reasonable/affordable these options will be, but I imagine it can't help but be an improvement over the near-monopoly that certain insurance companies have had in many states.

    (3) The Act requires large employers to provide insurance to *full-time* employees (or pay a penalty, or cut back their hours to part time). This doesn't directly help part-time employees, but it may indirectly help them over the long run: as more large employers offer decent health insurance, this may press smaller and part-time employers to provide it too in order to remain competitive at attracting the quality of workers they want to attract. Of course, this pressure is unlikely to do much while unemployment is still high. Unfortunately, among would-be higher educators, unemployment is likely to remain quite high for quite long, for various reasons largely involving the fact that there's low "demand" for educators compared to the available "supply" of people who would enjoy teaching, intellectualizing, and having fairly flexible schedules.

    I'm not sure I can think of any *better* way to do things, if we're going to stick with the (stupid) idea of tying people's healthcare to insurance companies and especially to employers. Of course it would be much better to shift to a single-payer medicare-for-all system, and give workers the freedom to switch employers easily, or to split their labor between multiple employers (as adjuncts often do) without needing to worry about the health-care implications.

    Reply
  6. MJ

    Are the adjuncts currently working WITHOUT health insurance not NOW at risk? The philosopher who sent the article talks of throwing adjuncts out in the street because of the requirements of Obamacare. That is exactly where they would be should they have some serious medical emergency or become pregnant. A strange notion indeed of compassion and risk.

    BL COMMENT: I assume the (reasonable) thought is that they will be worse off without a job, in addition to not having health insurance.

    Reply
  7. Peter

    While investigating options for adjunct work in the past year, I was told by one department at a school near my home town that in order to classify adjuncts as part time employees, they would only hire people to teach a 1-4 load, as if they taught two or more courses in consecutive terms they would have to provide health care. I don't know to what extent that was true, or was simply one institution's interpretation of health care laws. Also, I should say that this institution only paid $3,000 per course.

    Reply
  8. Dale Miller

    When this issue first arose my university's provost said that we would pay health insurance for adjuncts who taught enough that they were working for us over 30 hours a week. Then, however, our Governor declared that no state entity could let part-timers work enough hours that they would be due healthcare. After much arcane calculating, it was decided that adjuncts could teach an average of three courses a term. That means six for the year if they only teach fall and spring; if they're used in the summer, too, it could get up to nine courses a year. In my department we generally limited adjuncts to four in the fall and spring terms and didn't use them during the summer, which means that we haven't had to cancel any fall courses but will have to limit several to doing two in the spring. Across my college, though, I've heard that they're looking at having to cancel 40 courses fall courses because of this.

    In our state, each four-year university is being treated as a separate employer, as is the community college system. This means that an adjunct could potentially teach six courses for us in a year and six more for one of the local CCs (or six between the two local CCs). Frankly, I expect that most of our virtually full-time part-timers will be able to make roughly as much money by picking up CC courses, and the CCs will certainly be needing more instructors. Overall, though, I'm sure their lives won't be as good; they'll be driving more to teach the same amount. One bright side: over the last several years our Provost has upgraded around 50 of our best adjuncts, including one in my department, into full-time positions as lecturers. She's crunching the numbers now to see how many more conversions we can afford.

    It shouldn't be any shock that the Obamacare provision is having this result. It was an unintended consequences, but perfectly foreseeable. I talk about the plight of adjuncts in my business ethics courses, and one question I always ask students is what would happen next if we were told that we had to provide benefits to adjuncts who teach over a certain number of courses. Answer: No one gets to teach more than that number of courses.

    Reply
  9. Craig Duncan

    In a nutshell, it seems that the Affordable Care Act is forcing higher ed to choose between treating its part-timers more virtuously or more viciously.

    And "more viciously" seems to be the preferred option.

    Reply
  10. Kris Kemtrup

    If you work for a university that won't offer health insurance to your full-time colleagues and threatens to impoverish them through cutting of hours to avoid paying health insurance (in order to avoid something it could easily afford), and you don't threaten to strike immediately if the situation is not remedied, are you a bad person?

    I'm leaning to answering yes, but am open to nitpicking arguments.

    Reply
  11. Kris Kemtrup

    The problem is that in collective bargaining we have allowed administrations to employ people without health insurance. The ACA is not at fault for that. It merely requires us to solve the problem and that can only be done through collective bargaining. Tell the admin to either suffer a strike or cover health insurance for the vast, vast majority of workers. There can be no compromise on that anymore, and there should have never been compromise on it in the first place. Any such compromise is deeply immoral.

    Reply
  12. B

    Kris:
    In some states, New York, for example, it is illegal for state employees to strike.

    Reply

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