PSC-CUNY: Unemployment Insurance for Part-time Employees

Level of Government: State

As I am a constituent and a member of the Professional Staff Congress, the union of faculty and staff at CUNY, I am writing to urge you to support S4123 (Onorato), A0613-(John). This legislation would reform the Unemployment Insurance law to allow part-time adjunct college faculty to receive Unemployment Insurance benefits when they are out of work.

This legislation is designed to end the current practice of allowing letters of "intent to hire" -- conditioned on enrollment, funding and program changes -- to be used to establish "reasonable assurance" of future employment, the standard for educational workers under federal Unemployment Insurance law.

In 1970, a clause was added to unemployment insurance law to prevent school employees, who received an annual salary over ten months and "reasonable assurance" of employment for the following term, from "double-dipping" and receiving unemployment insurance. At that time, most college faculty were employed in stable, full-time positions. Since 1970, however, the higher education landscape has changed dramatically. The vast majority of college faculty positions are now either contingent or part-time, or both. Fewer than a third of all college faculty nationwide are in tenured or tenure-track positions.

Today's college faculty is largely composed of adjuncts, part-time faculty, who either combine their work as faculty with other jobs or rush from campus to campus piecing together a living. Adjuncts make about $3,000 per course and receive no compensation from their employer between college terms. Adjuncts rarely receive paid time off, health insurance, or retirement benefits.

Most important, adjuncts have no guarantee of being rehired for the following semester once the course ends. In this respect, adjunct faculty and other part-time college instructional personnel are similar to seasonal resort workers, construction or entertainment trades workers whose employment is episodic and who receive unemployment benefits between jobs. It is only fair that adjunct faculty have similar access.

Under current New York State law, adjuncts are in a double bind. The "letters of intent" to hire adjuncts received from the employer makes it clear that reappointment is contingent on funding, enrollment, and program. These letters provide no assurance of a future position. Indeed, it is often the case that adjuncts are told a day or two before class begins that their assigned class has been canceled or given to someone else to teach.

Yet, when it comes to adjuncts' right to Unemployment Insurance, institutions of higher education maintain that the conditional "letters of intent" constitute "reasonable assurance" of future employment. On this basis, benefits are routinely denied.

This bill would solve this dilemma by presuming that a conditional "letter of intent" to hire is evidence of the episodic nature of adjunct employment and by placing the burden on college employers to present evidence to overcome this presumption. By instituting a case-by-case review process, the bill would prevent employers from misusing the federal provision to deny benefits to adjunct faculty who otherwise should be eligible.

California and Washington State have solved this problem by clarifying what constitutes "reasonable assurance;"it's time for New York to do the same by passing S4123/A0613.

Sincerely,

Your Name Here