According to Inside Higher Education, The Community College of Allegheny County will cut course loads and hours for some 200 adjunct faculty members and 200 additional employees to avoid paying $6 million in Affordable Care Act-related fees in January 2014.
Why are they doing this? Because right now, adjuncts and other temporary workers in higher education who work 30+ hours receive NO HEALTH INSURANCE. They are also paid so poorly that they qualify for food stamps. Cutting back on their hours is the least of these people's problems.
So, are the adjuncts and temporary faculty who teach the majority of classes at many colleges across the country going to be better off or worse off, because of Obamacare? Better off, because even if they teach one less class, they will qualify for government health insurance.
Stories like this highlight the hypocrisy and the exploitation that occurs in academia and in the workplace today.
Apt. 11d 
As a grad student, Obamacare has already made my life better, by improving my health insurance starting this September. The change is more symbolically helpful for me at this point, but it has made a real difference for some of my friends.
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My faculty union is in the middle of contract negotiations. We just voted to authorize the chapter presidents to strike. Since we are one of the largest faculty unions–6,000 members–and teach 20,000 students, if there’s a strike it will be national news.
We have always paid adjuncts the same salary per class that the lowest paid tenure track employee gets per class(if they are hired at instructor level, which they can be), if you divide their salary by the 8 classes per year they teach. Therefore our adjuncts make substantially more than other adjuncts–a living wage. But the State wants to have a two tier pay system like everywhere else.
I would give up everything else we are bargaining for to retain the rights for adjuncts to have a living wage. It’s the only thing I would want to strike over.
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That is, other than having to teach 5 classes per semester. That was one of the things originally on the table. I admit I would have found that hard to take.
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“Cutting back on their hours is the least of these people’s problems.”
My auntie is a CC adjunct and I assure you that she has a lively interest in how many courses she’s getting every semester. It fluctuates wildly and it’s not clear what she’s going to be teaching often until literally days before class starts. (My auntie crossed over from adjunct to adjunct-who-also-has-administrative-gig a year or two ago, but there were many years where the difference between three and two courses would make a huge difference in her income.)
“According to Inside Higher Education, The Community College of Allegheny County will cut course loads and hours for some 200 adjunct faculty members and 200 additional employees to avoid paying $6 million in Affordable Care Act-related fees in January 2014.”
Who could have seen that coming?
In related news, my dad was telling me a story from a recent business event where the hottest ticket was a talk on restructuring your business (i.e. laying off employees) to get down to 49 employees to avoid ACA requirements.
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There’s an old joke – two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of ’em says, “Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.” The other one says, “Yeah, I know; and such small portions.”
Woody Allen, from Annie Hall
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They tried something like cutting the number of sections adjuncts could teach at my university a few years ago, and they’re back to their regular numbers now. I take all this with a grain of salt. Everyone is full of ideas to cut costs etc., but demand is demand, and no sane business would cut back employees if there is enough demand.
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CCAC certainly isn’t a business in the usual sense of the word and I wouldn’t assume sane leadership if it involves Allegheny County government. More efficiently exploiting the young to pay the old better is basically local government’s job one.
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