[caption id=”attachment_103411″ align=”aligncenter” width=”605″] (Associated Press)
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The latest battle over Obamacare is bringing out a sharp divide on college campuses. But it’s not between liberals and conservatives, it’s between the college administrations and their adjunct professors.
And it’s all over the definition of full-time work.
Under the Affordable Care Act, large employers are required to provide health insurance to employees working full time or pay a hefty penalty. Full-time work is currently defined as 30 hours per week, but both the House and Senate are working on passing legislation that would redefine it as 40 hours a week.
Inside Higher Ed reports that many colleges and universities have started limiting the number of hours adjunct faculty can work to keep them under than 30-hour threshold and keep them as part-time workers.
These institutions support the move up to a 40-hour work week.
Thomas J. Snyder, president of Indiana’s community college system, told Inside Higher Ed that he supported the change. His school system employs about 4,000 adjunct professors and about 1,500 full-time faculty.
“Part of our strategy to keep tuition affordable is to have 50 percent of our classroom time taught by adjunct professors,” he said. “The Affordable Care Act has caused us to reassess our ability to do that.”
Right now, to comply with the 30-hour standard, Snyder has capped course loads for adjuncts to keep them well below the limit. Otherwise, the system would have faced a $10 to $12 million insurance bill, Snyder told Inside Higher Ed.
The upping of the work week standard would help adjuncts teach more classes, he said.
The College and University Professional Association for Human Resources has also formally backed the change.
“What we’ve seen, as many other industries have seen, is that there has been a reduction in hours for employees who weren’t provided health insurance benefits before because of budget constraints that universities face,”Josh Ulman, the group’s chief government relations officer, told the news outlet.
But unions representing those adjunct professors are railing against the proposed changes.
“If the threshold for coverage is raised from 30 to 40 hours, these contingent workers will lose a hard-fought opportunity for employer health coverage,” Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said in a statement. “Rather than embracing the spirit of the ACA to help expand health care for all working families, this unwarranted change would subvert the law’s intent to cover more Americans and close off a much-needed health insurance option.”
What these unions and President Obama, who has already threatened to veto the proposed legislation, seem to forget is that businesses aren’t falling in line with the intent of the law. While the intent was that more people would be eligible for coverage, in actuality, less people, particularly adjunct professors, are reaping the benefits.
