Adjunct Health Care Gets a Hearing in Boston
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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