IRS goes to bat for adjunct faculty health insurance

This is one of the first things I've heard about how Obamacare will benefit part time faculty. If the Feds actually pursue this angle aggressively, it could take away a lot of the economic benefit for colleges of relying so heavily on part time faculty and maybe make them offer more full time jobs instead.

Maybe.

IRS: Adjunct Faculty Hours Must Be Calculated With 'Reasonable' Method

The Internal Revenue Service put colleges and universities on warning with new proposed rules issued this month, warning them not to skimp when counting the hours adjunct faculty work. The guidelines from the IRS could be critical to ensuring whether part-time college instructors receive health care benefits as new Affordable Care Act laws take effect. 

The IRS noted in the Federal Register that "educational organizations generally do not track the full hours of service of adjunct faculty, but instead compensate adjunct faculty on the basis of credit hours taught." In short, most colleges are only paying part-time instructors for time spent in a classroom, and nothing for time spent grading or preparing. 

The Treasury Department and the IRS are considering and "invite further comment on how best to determine the full-time status of employees" like educators, who may work many hours after students leave the classroom. 

Starting in January 2014, any employee working 30 hours or more per week will be considered a full-time faculty member andwill be entitled to health insurance through an employer under new federal rules, with an exception for certain small businesses. So far, several schools have cut adjuncts' hours to avoid the requirement and save cash. Matt Williams, vice president of New Faculty Majority, a group that advocates for collective bargaining rights of adjunct instructors and professors, told The Huffington Post in November he expects this type of action to happen more often. 

From the Huffington Post

Bill would cut student loan forgiveness time in HALF

On March 8, Congressman Hansen Clarke (D-Mich.) introduced H.R. 4170, the Student Loan Forgiveness Act of 2012.

Here's the part that should be of interest to all faculty and our students:

Improving Public Service Loan Forgiveness: The act would also provide for Public Service Loan Forgiveness after 60 monthly payments instead of 120. It is impossible for us to overstate how much this would help borrowers who have committed to careers at relatively low-paying public interest jobs, who could actually start saving for their kids' education and perhaps owning their own home half a decade earlier than they anticipated.

Read the details of the other improvements here.

If you are reading this, you need to contact your congressmember and senators and tell them to support his bill. It doesn't have to be a long, fancy letter, just say

I am your constituent, and I want you to actively support and vote for HR 4170, the Student Loan Forgiveness Act of 2012.

Even if you don't know who represents you in Congress, if you know your own zip code, you can find their contact information here.

You could even call 202 225-3121, or these numbers and if you know where you live, they can connect you to your representatives. 

College wanted to privatize adjunct faculty to strip their pensions

Kirtland Community College in Michigan considered privatizing the handling of adjunct faculty payroll to avoid pension contributions for adjuncts. Of course the school would still decide which adjuncts to hire and fire, so this would add another layer of administrative dishonesty to the existing one that faculty who work for them for decades are "temporary."

This story also shows why it is essential for adjuncts to join or organize unions. Contact the American Federation of Teachers and ask them if you have a local to join or how to organize one. If you don't, pretty soon you'll be wearing a paper hat and asking your students if they would like fries with their lecture.

The AFT FACE blog described the proposed scam:

The trustees considered the plan last August because, if privatized, the adjuncts would not be part of the state's defined benefit pension plan. This would save the college the 17 percent contribution the state requires for each employee and save the adjuncts, many of whom don't put in enough time to vest, a required 3 percent contribution.

The plan was to farm out payroll administration of their adjunct's compensation but retain recruiting and hiring rights. So the adjuncts-some 80 who are hired each semester-would be employed by a private company that specializes in placing substitute teachers.

The 39 full-time faculty at KCC are represented by the AFT Michigan, but adjuncts have no union. KCC Federation of Teachers vice president Kevin Baughn and AFT Michigan president/AFT vice president David Hecker participated in discussion of the idea at KCC's January board meeting.

FULL TEXT

An INSIDE HIGHER ED article on this story

This time it didn't happen, but this isn't the last time we'll hear about this idea. Faculty unions should start preparing legislation to block efforts like this now, before the ball gets rolling.

It's ironic that when military functions were privatized, the mercenaries got paid ten times as much as real soldiers, but when they propose this for college instructors or actually go through with it like they have for K-12 teachers with corporate charter schools, it is invariably used to strip the pay and benefits of educators.

Shouldn't we have higher priorities than continually cutting budgets to save money to pay for tax cuts for the rich?

3 ways education spending could IMMEDIATELY help create jobs

As the president and Congress discuss how to create jobs, they seem to be circling around a lot of the usual ideas: tax cuts for businesses that hire, subsidies and incentives for green energy, and building contracts for infrastructure and the like.

What we haven't heard much about is DIRECT government action to create jobs. The problem with creating public jobs for things like renewable energy is it could conceivably compete with private sector businesses already doing the same thing. This would not be the case if education were used to both remove some workers from the job force and create additional jobs.

The quickest fix would be to change the structure of college financial aid, so more kids could go to college full time. I teach community college and most of my students have to work full time to pay their way through school, which means they will be lucky to get their bachelor degree by thirty. If those kids (and older students) got enough financial aid to go to school full time, they would free up low end jobs for others.

We could also create jobs by hiring more K-12 teachers to dramatically reduce class size, especially in poorer communities. Even a crappy teacher can do a passable job if the class is small enough, and even the best teacher will struggle if a class is too big. We could also hire more classroom aides to help teachers, and people to provide after school programs to keep kids out of trouble. That would not only creat jobs but pay more dividends in the long run than the right wing "education reform" snake oil of merit pay and privatized charter schools.

The third way to create jobs with education is less obvious. At community colleges, the vast majority of instructors are part time, have no job security, receive few or no benefits, and are paid as little as a quarter as much as their full time peers. To a lesser but still significant degree, the same thing happens at four year public universities. Consequently, two things happen that distort the academic labor market:

1. Part time faculty teach more classes to make up for low pay or have a second job in the private sector.
   


2. Full time faculty are pressured to teach more than a full time load so administrators can get the maximum value for the benefit dollars they are forced to spend on the lucky few.
   

Here in California, colleges have the added incentive of being allowed to pay these full time faculty LESS than their regular pay for these extra class (the opposite of the usual overtime rules requiring "time and a half" pay)

A slight change in these labor practices would create more academic jobs:

• Require that three-quarters of college faculty be full time and/or all facutly be paid on one pay scale, so part time faculty teach fewer classes (freeing some up for someone else to teach) or quit their jobs in the private sector (freeing them up so someone else can be hired).

• Ban full time faculty from teaching more than a full time load, freeing up their excess classes for someone else to teach (and giving them more time to be available to students).

The federal government could cause these changes with both a carrot and stick--the carrot of funding for the extra full time positions, and the stick of making federal funding contingent on adopting these labor practices.

President Obama announced a community college initiative last summer that would spend money on buildings, technology, and online curriculum, but the jobs effect of all of those would be temporary at best. The real change has to be how the instructors who show up to teach in those shiny new buildings but don't know how they will pay their rent at the end of the semester are treated.

All three of these would do our country more good than any contract to build a road or bridge, or a tax cut that will just be used to sock more money away in a Cayman Islands account.

AFT wants cut in adjunct abuse in higher ed bill

After the House of Representatives recently passed a bill shifting college financial aid away from private banks and more toward grants directly to students, the president of the American Federation of Teachers sent a letter to the House saying that the final version of the bill should inclusion language on the abuse of adjunct faculty:

The lack of attention paid to the loss of full-time tenured faculty positions, and the overwhelming growth of poorly paid part-time faculty, has been taking a toll on higher education for many years. Today, almost three out of four undergraduate instructors are contingent rather than permanent full-time faculty members-contingent faculty members teach a majority of the nation's undergraduate courses. Unless we take steps to reverse course, this trend will greatly impair the ability of our colleges and universities to reach the national goals Congress has set for them.

Specifically, we believe it is essential that programs designed to improve persistence and completion, especially those targeted at community colleges, should include provisions that encourage institutions to strengthen their instructional workforce by creating additional full-time faculty positions or providing more stability and equitable compensation for part-time faculty.

FULL TEXT

I was grateful to see this campaign, but concerned about the weak language, and added the following note to the post the on the AFT website, and to my letter to our senators:

You should not just ask for language to "encourage" or "permit" this but REQUIRE it, and not just "reduce" unequal pay and compensation but END it.

Too many college administrators not only do not make ending these inequities a priority, but they actively fight against ending them.

We can not depend on them to act responsibly without forceful legislation requiring them to do so.

I also fail to see why our union can't say that schools are economically abusing people who have dedicated their lives to education, including, in many cases, not giving us health insurance, or not giving us enough to cover our families as well.

If we are going to get on the radar, we aren't going to do it by soft-pedaling the problem.

Frankly, there is potentially a very brief window for progressive action in Washington. If Democrats do not pass a strong health insurance reform bill, that window will begin to close and might well be gone after the 2010 election. If they do pass good legislation, there will be momentum that we should ride to get major things done.

We must set our sights higher than glacial, incremental change or we won't get any change at all.

LINK to write letter to senators

Article on AFT president's letter

We should use the AFT link to write to show the AFT that we appreciate the effort, but I would also ask that you compose your own letter to our senators and congressman about H.R. 3221 with stronger language than the campaign.

Labor Secretary on NPR sidesteps part timer question

As I was leaving one of my two jobs the other day, I turned on NPR and heard Labor Secretary Hilda Solis on some NPR show taking calls. The first one I heard was from a part timer who laid out our problems pretty well: paid far less than full time colleagues, often no get no benefits, the lessened availability to students as we zip from campus to campus to patch together enough to survive, and the irony of all that given how important the president has said community colleges are. He also noted that a lot of the stimulus money went to one time building projects instead of persistent abuses like this.

Her answer was disturbing. She hemmed and hawed a lot and said this was primarily a state issue, and their job was mostly to insure that contracts were enforced. She went on to say it would be tough to fix issues like this because of the current budget crisis.

Even the host of the show said their would was little in her answer that would comfort the person asking the question.

While Solis is obviously better than the Bush secretary of labor who called teachers' unions terrorists, her answer is unacceptable for a number of reasons.

For one, the federal government intervenes in education at the state level all the time. It forced the steaming pile of excrement No Child Left Behind on K-12 schools, and more admirably, sets anti-discrimination conditions on colleges that take federal money. It doesn't take too much creativity to see how they could set minimum academic labor standards on colleges and universities.

I would have some sympathy for the budget argument if the first thing the Obama administration had done WASN'T giving nearly a trillion dollars to people on Wall Street who caused more economic harm than any terrorists could in their wildest dreams. He just recently reappointed Ben Bernanke who gave trillions more to the same crooks and refused to tell Congress how much he gave to which ones.

Wall Street hurts people on purpose to further enrich a very, very few. We do our jobs in hope that those we serve will be better citizens and better able to support their families. It is offensive for a supposedly Democratic administration to say they can do nothing for us while they give more than enough to fix our problems to sociopathic trust fund babies on Wall Street who spend the money on bonuses and parties and squirrel the rest away in offshore accounts.

audio of question & her answer

TRANSCRIPT OF PART TIMER QUESTION:

CONAN: We're speaking with the secretary of labor, Hilda Solis. You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. And this email from Betsy(ph) in Cape Cod: I'm a part-time community college faculty member. We earn a small fraction of the salary our full-time colleagues earn for doing the same job, and many of us get no benefits. The stimulus money that was supposed to be going to keep jobs is frequently going instead to one-time capital projects. Even those of us who Re unionized - and we are the minority - are unable in the main to strike so there is very little we can do during contract negotiations. If educating people is as important as the president said, is strengthening faculty salaries, benefits and job security part of your agenda? If so, how do you propose to do it?

Sec. SOLIS: Wow. That's a big challenge. But it's one that I understand well as a former trustee of a community college and understand well the challenges, because many states by the way, who provide most of the bulk of support for funding for community colleges, their revenue has gone down. So, I know even in my own state of California many people have been pink-slipped, laid off. They've had to reduce class size and actually turn away a number of students that want to enroll in the fall, or postpone their education. So, I understand there has to be a need to help provide assistance and leadership for community colleges. And just to give you an idea, most of the training money that DOL is putting out - a lot of it will be going in partnership with community colleges. So, there will be an opportunity to hire up, to bring in more faculty and to also expand the services that community colleges offer because they are by and large the people that entertain the most number of people who go into a higher education.

CONAN: I didn't hear a lot in there that would make her happier about the conditions in which she works.

Sec. SOLIS: A lot of - I think a lot of that - certainly we want to make sure that contracts are respected, collective bargaining agreements. There's always been an issue with respect to different bargaining groups, or groups that are represented in bargaining groups, that want to be a part of that. So, I think the continuance of involvement on the part of part-time faculty members I think is a legitimate issue and should be looked at. Because as it stands, you also find that that faculty member is not as inclined to stay committed to those groups of students that they do teach because they're off to different - other -what they call, freeway traveling or teaching…

CONAN: Mm-hmm.

Sec. SOLIS: …because they're going to find wherever they can get their salary paid. And it's unfortunate that that's what it's kind of turned to. I hope that we could end that in some way. But right now with the recession being what it is, I think it's going to be difficult.

Talk of the Nation, Aug. 25, 2009

What's it like to be higher ed adjunct faculty? Tell your story

For decades, higher education has been aping the personnel practices of corporate America and relying more and more on part time, temporary, and non-tenure track faculty, especially to teach the course required for graduation.

While this is great for administrators to free up money in their budget for other things, it can wreck havoc on the lives of those who didn't expect to get rich teaching but did expect to be able to pay their rent and student loan payments every month and know that they'd continue to have a job if they were doing it relatively well.

Various groups have been working on changing this at the state level, and adjuncts and contingent faculty are finally starting to come together at a national level in groups like the New Majority Faculty, which I am a part of.

To help us figure out which things to focus on changing, WE NEED YOUR STORIES.

You can post them as text in the comments of this article or if you are feeling more multimedia, as a video reply to this youtube thread.

Tell us what has happened to you as an adjunct, non-tenure track, part time, temporary (usually all of the above) faculty member in higher education, both on the job and in your personal life as a consequence of having a job.

For example, I told my own story here, and the story of an instructor who resorted to going through the trash for pop cans to make ends meet. I have known instructors who still lived with their parents into their fifties and others who have had marriages unravel because their income didn't live up to their spouse's expectations for someone with their education level.

On the professional front, a friend of mine set up a PACE program for his college, then when the time came to give someone a full-time tenure track job to run it, they hired someone from outside the school (who promptly asked my friend how to do his job since he had padded his resume). Just recently, this instructor was fired from his community college after eighteen years of service, most likely because he was vice president of the part time faculty union.

Your stories will not only help us figure out what to fight for but give us powerful evidence to present to legislators and groups that work on higher education issues that using Walmart labor practices does real harm to real people.

If you wish to remain anonymous, that's fine, though the more specific the details, the more useful your story will be, for example, say what state you are in, whether you are at a two-year or four-year college or research university, public or private, what discipline you teach in, your qualifications to teach, and how long you've been doing it. Any information you don't want to include is okay though.

Post written stories

Post video stories

New Majority Faculty collecting stories from part time, contingent, and other non-tenure track higher ed faculty

There's a new NATIONAL group for adjuncts, part timers, contingent faculty, and whatever else colleges and universities call the instructors who do most of the teaching but get few of benefits like job security, equal pay, and often not even health insurance.

They want to hear your story about being an adjunct, and start to figure out what we can do together to change things.

You can post on Youtube, in response to this this video:

(click pic to see flick)

Here's sort of what they're looking for (sound track and other production optional):

INSIDE HIRING: the parable of the faithful girlfriend not chosen as a wife

Once there was a man who was pretty successful in life, but he could not have done it without his faithful girlfriend. She fixed his breakfast, washed his clothes, took care of him when he was sick, bore his children and raised them well, and even helped him with his work when he fell behind.

She was wife in all but name and benefits. She didn't get on his health insurance, would inherit nothing when he dies, and when he went on vacation, he wouldn't take her.

One day, he announced that he wanted to finally get married. The girlfriend was giddy and asked, "When do I get the ring?"

"Well," he said, "I don't know that I'm going to marry YOU. But you are welcome to compete for the position. Just come down to the Harem Hut tomorrow.

When she arrived, she found that it was a strip club. The other women dancing in g-strings were young and thin and sleek, but the girlfriend had stretch marks from having the man's children and she had put on weight because she had often skipped going to the gym to help him catch up on his work. And when it was her turn to dance, she moved awkwardly about the stage in a manner that was hardly seductive at all, especially compared to the young women who still danced every night.

Then the man questioned all the women about how they would keep house and raise his children. The young women all said they would keep his as spotless as an operating room and his children would grow up to be presidents and Nobel Prize winning scientists. This pleased the man very much. When he asked his girlfriend of many years the same questions, "You know how I would clean your house because you have seen it every day. You know how I would raise your children because I already have. I don't know if any of them will win the Nobel Prize or be president, but they seem to be happy people, more successful than you or I, and they will care for us in our old age." Her answers were not as impressive, but undeniably true. Nonetheless, the man refused to judge based on what he had seen with his own eyes, and only take into account what the contestants said.

And so the man chose one of the young women and not the girlfriend who had served him faithfully for many years.

Within six months, the young woman had drained his bank accounts, stolen his car, filed for divorce, and sold one of his kidneys.

He called the girlfriend to his side and said, "I must find another wife. Give me a ride to the Harem Hut."

"Don't you think this a stupid way to choose a wife?" she said in exasperation.

"Nonsense," he said. "This is the best way to do it. Most of the young girls do not betray the men who choose them and sell their kidneys."

"Wouldn't it make more sense to choose me since I have served you faithfully for years?" she said.

"I would have," he said, "If you had answered the questions more artfully, lost some weight, and brushed up on your dance steps. But you are welcome to try again. Some of my friends have actually married their girlfriends, so it's not like it never happens."

She should not have come back because of his ungratefulness, but she had little choice since it was the custom of all the men in the land to ask prospective wives questions and grade their dances, and she was no longer young, so the men who didn't know her would not pick her in any case.

This time the man chose another young woman, and this one did not rob him, but really knew nothing about being a wife (in spite of her clever answers and seductive dance), so she asked the girlfriend what to do. The girlfriend helped her, and their children grew up as brothers and sisters and were equally successful in life, regardless of whether their mother was wife or the girlfriend. Sometimes when they were alone, the wife would even tell the girlfriend that if she ever decided to leave the man, she would tell him to marry the girlfriend.

The wife did leave him after they had been married long enough for her to get half the property in the divorce, but by then the girlfriend was dead, so her promise didn't matter.

***

This is what the hiring process is like for an adjunct. We serve an institution faithfully for years, teaching the same classes as our full time counterparts, serving on committees when we are allowed, and doing all the things faculty are supposed to do only without receiving the same rewards.

Then when it comes time to hire someone for a full time job, the hiring committee thinks they are doing us a great favor by giving us an interview and treating us exactly the same as someone they don't know. They don't often hire the person who steals their kidneys, but they will pick someone flashy and glib or bubbly because they are just out of grad school, only to then ask the part timer to tell the new full timer how to do their job--but they would NEVER lose their kidneys or hire someone who needed on the job training if they chose based on what they had seen over years instead of over a few minutes.

This is why community college districts must be required to offer full time jobs to part timers before they open it up to outside applicants.

And because hiring committees can't seem to tell the difference between a good life partner and a good lap dance.

Will Obama let colleges keep treating faculty like Walmart workers?

The Huffington Post ran a good article on how colleges and universities abuse most of their faculty by having two separate and unequal classes: one paid far less per class to do the same job and usually given no job security or health benefits.

The best part of the article is the bit when she asks administrators if they aren't ashamed of doing this (which I have included at the end). I asked the same thing on the discussion board at The Chronicle of Higher Education, and administrators actually said it was our own fault because adjuncts are stupid enough to take the jobs.

KEY EXCERPTS:






Gina Nahai

Posted December 14, 2008 | 09:30 PM (EST)

The Great Shame of America's Colleges

You think Wal-Mart employees are exploited?

What if I told you that all over this country, major institutions created and sustained with a mission to pursue the betterment of mankind, colleges and universities that sit on billion dollar endowments are using the current economic crisis to further enrich themselves at the expense of the meager livelihood of long-time faculty? That at the same time as they claim to be the guardians of knowledge and the champions of the arts, they treat their faculty to the legal and financial equivalent of what migrant day laborers earn by standing outside Home Depot?

Freeway Flyers: aka "adjunct professors", aka "teaching professionals." They're the dirty little secret of universities and colleges all around the United States. They're the PhDs with decades of teaching experience, award-winning artists, published authors whose names and reputations draw students to the universities, whose work justifies the $50,000/year tuition, raises the million-dollar donations, earns the sought after rankings in USA Today's annual poll.

In exchange for all that, they are hired only on a part-time basis, made to sign a pledge that they will not work more than twenty hours a week and will not--not now, not ever--have a claim to health or retirement or any other kind of benefits, not even a parking pass. That they are "at will" employees who can be let go at any time, for any reason. Their salaries are so meager, they have to teach two, three, sometimes five classes a semester, at five different universities, just to pay their rent. That's why they're called Freeway Flyers. One writer I knew taught for twenty years at a Southern California college with more money than the GNP of a small country. He was paid so little, he had to supplement his income by working the graveyard shift at airport gift shops. He was the author of one of the biggest literary novels of the 20th century; when he died, his family couldn't afford to bury him. Another guy--a teacher of mine from the days when I was a student of writing--drove four hours each way to teach the same class for twenty-seven years. He made something near $3,000 a semester. He was recently let go because the school could take advantage of the rising unemployment rates to hire a younger person for less than $3,000.

***

Aren't the heads of these colleges ashamed of the exploitation? Wouldn't they want to do the right thing even if they don't have to?

I've asked many of them these questions, especially recently. One of them was a former peace corps volunteer. Their answers are short and scripted: "Of course we want to do the right thing; but only when possible." His colleague, another dean, lamented openly the fact that out of every professor on their payroll, there was one who could not be let go or forced to work for half her usual salary because that one, unfortunately, had a contract. Not that anyone's unhappy with the professor's work, mind you. They just don't like paying more than they have to.

FULL TEXT

Even during the darkest days of the Bush administration, higher education was an island of reasoned debate and progressive dissent. This apartheid faculty system, with a small minority given decent pay and job security, and the rest exploited and abused, is part of the right's decades long effort to crush any sources of opposition. As Karl Rove said:

As people do better, they start voting like Republicans --- unless they have too much education and vote Democratic, which proves there can be too much of a good thing.

(from The New Yorker, Feb. 6, 2001)

Anything that threatens Karl Rove and his kindred spirits in the GOP should be protected and rewarded.

If you think this abuse of faculty is something that should change, tell the incoming Obama administration.

VIDEO: Indiana Jones, part time faculty

You have to listen carefully to his answer at the end: