Update on California AB 375: Squid Game for Contingent Faculty (again)

On October 8 Governor Newsom, fresh from surviving a recall, failed to approve AB 375.

In his message to the Assembly, Newsom said it would “create significant ongoing cost pressures on the state and community college districts.”  Really?

Turns out, it’s about access to health insurance.  If someone who normally teaches at two or three or more different institutions should become able to consolidate a schedule and teach 4 classes at one institution, it’s conceivable that they would reach the 30 hour per week threshold that would trigger eligibility for employer contributions towards ACA (Obamacare) health insurance. “Conceivable” is pretty hypothetical: they’re including office hours, meetings, and administrator’s scheduling mistakes.  But supposing the “conceivable” happened to everyone: the CA Senate Appropriations Committee estimates that the cost to the state for providing health insurance for 40,000 contingent faculty at $11,000 each to be $440,000,000.

Better they should just go without! When $11,000 is shoved down onto the wallets of contingents, it becomes a joke: No one who might be in the group that would benefiting from consolidating makes anywhere near enough to buy into healthcare at those prices. That’s probably a quarter of their total annual income.

Having just watched the Netflix show Squid Game, I am freshly sensitized to the way tiny vulnerabilities add up to catastrophes that fall hard on the heads and shoulders of the working class. The game is going on all around us.

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But hold on — there is another shoe to drop. See next post.