Adjunct Health Care Gets a Hearing in Boston
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by
Jennifer Berkshire
ADD UP THE hours that Cynthia Duda spends teaching English
in the Massachusetts state college system, and you get a number
just under forty hours a week. Since state employees who work
half-time or more for the Commonwealth are eligible for health-care
benefits, Duda should be covered too, right? Wrong. Due to
a loophole that many of the state’s adjunct faculty slip right
through, the state doesn’t recognize the total number of hours
spent teaching, if the work is done at different schools in
the system.
“What happens is that you have adjuncts teaching in three
or four schools, and they’re being told ‘no, that doesn’t
count,'” says Duda. “We just want our insurance.”
That’s the message that Duda and other adjuncts recently
took to the Massachusetts statehouse. Teaming up with a lobbyist
from the Massachusetts Teachers Association, the adjunct faculty
members testified in favor of a bill that would give adjuncts
health-insurance coverage if they teach at least four courses
per year, on any combination of campuses or colleges in the
public higher-education system. Another related bill would
enable adjuncts to participate in the state retirement system,
as well as allowing them to buy back previous service into
the system, a priority for full-time teachers who began their
careers as adjuncts.
“The situation looks very promising,” says Jonathan Millman,
a part-time faculty member in the economics department at
UMass-Boston and a member of the Coalition of Contingent Academic
Labor (COCAL). “We received a positive response from the members
of the Senate Public Services Committee, and we’ve since heard
that there’s a good chance that the health-care bill will
be passed into law.”
The status of the retirement bill remains unclear.
While Millman, Duda, and other adjuncts in Massachusetts
are keeping an eye on the state’s legislative process, they
stress that the real victory in this case involves more than
just a successful lobbying effort. Rather, says Millman, the
legislative campaign is just the latest indicator of a growing
movement of adjunct faculty members in the state.
“This was the first time that part-timers and adjuncts have
ever participated in a lobbying effort,” says Millman. “I
think that’s what is really important here.”
Millman notes that the group would never have received a
hearing from the Massachusetts state legislature had it not
been for the assistance of the Massachusetts Teachers Association,
an affiliate of the National Educational Association. But
at the same time, he concludes, it was only the stepped-up
organizing efforts of the adjuncts themselves that got their
issues onto the union’s radar.
“It definitely took some pressure,” said Millman, noting
that an activist group from UMass-Boston handed out leaflets
about the situation of part-time faculty at the union’s statewide
convention two years ago. “But now that they’re on board,
the MTA has been extremely helpful.”
Cynthia Duda, who has been teaching in the state college
system since 1990, views the legislative campaign as a good
first step, a specific remedy for one problem faced by adjuncts
in Massachusetts. Ultimately though, argues Duda, something
must be done about the “bigger picture,” an educational system
that she believes has become the “epitome of exploitation.”
“At first it was hard to get part-timers to do anything. But
there still needs to be a whole lot more,” says Duda.
“If all the part-time people walked off the job, the state
system would shut down.”
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