ObamaCare Reduces Employee Hours at Colleges

Sometimes Justice pays a visit to those who have most assiduously attempted to evade it.

Obama and his Collectivist Party have had extremely high support at our colleges and universities.  Recent college graduates, including many who cannot find jobs, voted for him overwhelmingly not just in the 2008 election, but in the 2012 election when any sane person would have known better.  The faculty and support staff of most colleges and universities have been even more fanatical supporters of the socialist president and the Democrat Socialist Party.  Most of them eagerly supported ObamaCare, the law no one read and most of which was subsequently written in reality by bureaucrats, who are still busy writing it.

The Justice is that most colleges are now under some financial pressure and finding it hard to allow their operational costs to exceed the inflation rate several times over for the first time in decades.  Many, in their mad quest to add more and more administrative personnel, had been scrimping on faculty for a long time.  In 1975, full time non-tenure track faculty and part-time adjunct teaching staff were 43% of the faculty at U.S. colleges.  In 2009, they had grown to 69% of the faculty.  Tenured and tenured track faculty have shrunk dramatically, which supposedly would mean that teaching skills have decreased as well.

It now turns out that ObamaCare is causing numerous colleges to reduce the hours of their long-growing adjunct professors to fewer than 30 hours a week so that they will not have to pay the penalty tax for not providing them with health insurance.  See the Wall St. Journal of 19-20 January 2013 for more on this.  They most certainly do not want to actually provide them with health insurance since the ObamaCare insurance requirements are causing the cost of health insurance premiums to skyrocket.  The worst of the cost increases are just about to land hard on employers everywhere.

Of course colleges are not just planning to reduce the hours of adjunct professors.  They plan to reduce the hours of many on their support and administrative staffs also.  Just as restaurant chains and retail chains are reducing the number of hours of their employees to less than 30 hours a week, so are many colleges planning to make such reductions.  In the ObamaCollectivistNation, fewer and fewer people will have full-time jobs.  It was really the same in the Soviet Union, where 12 people commonly stood around and watched as one or two people did some work.  Of course, there they pretended they all had part-time jobs, but they were paid in accordance with the work they did not do.

A Mr. Balla, an adjunct professor at Stark College in North Canton, Ohio, said after receiving a letter informing him of his reduced hours:

I think it goes against the spirit of the law.  In education, we're working for the public good, we are public employees at a public institution; we should be the first ones to uphold the law, to set the example.

 He says he will not be able to afford ObamaCare insurance on his own.  Poor special person!  Perhaps he should just suck it up and find a job in the private sector that he looks down his nose at and learns how hard it is to earn a living while carrying all the entitlees  and "public" employees on your back and obeying the flurry of unreadable and unintelligible regulations and the many irrational mandates of the local, state, and federal governments.  It really irks me that these people claim to be serving the "public" when they are so clearly serving themselves as privileged rulers over the brutes they think populate the private sector.  This guy claims his right to the Cadillac ObamaCare insurance provided by the taxpayer even as millions of private sector workers have their employment hours reduced because of his lovely ObamaCare tyranny.  He claims his special privilege as a worker for the public good even as tax revenues from the many with fewer hours worked in the private sector must go down.  But, our saintly educator must get his privileged health insurance despite any such inconvenient reality.  The Federal Reserve will surely just print the additional needed money and give it to the colleges.

The colleges have long failed to serve us well.  They are bastions opposed to the sovereign individual rights of each of us.  They have long favored collectivism and opposed the American Principle of limited government with powers so restricted that it could not violate individual rights.  Their man Obama just reiterated his allegiance to collectivism and his real opposition to our individual rights in his Second Inaugural Address.

What is more, they do not even do a decent job of preparing their students for work in the private sector.  They are turning out droves of young people too privileged to actually be willing to work hard.  Their student product is ignorant of civics and U.S. history, of economics, of business reality, of the climate, of fossil fuels and their use, of writing skills, of logic and the construction of rational thought, and of science.  Most fallaciously believe they are qualified to choose the values by which others shall be forced to live their lives and able to choose politicians who will micromanage our incompetent lives in the private sector.  They are so full of themselves and so very hollow in reality.  Just like our Mr. Balla.

Well, their support for ObamaCare is about to result in their shooting themselves in the foot.  At least unless the efforts of such college groups as the American Association of Community Colleges to get the IRS to write the rules to exclude colleges from ObamaCare's requirements works.  The Obama regime has a tremendous propensity for writing administrative rules that exclude their biggest supporters from the rule of law.  We have already seen them write massive exceptions for unions and for companies from Nancy Pelosi's district.

Speaking of unions, more and more of college adjunct professors are already in unions.  About 37% of part-time non-tenured faculty are in unions already.  The colleges are fearing that putting these people on fewer hours will cause even more of them to join unions.  It is very funny that unions and their Collectivist Party are nearly universally supported on college campuses,  until unions approach their lower paid faculty and threaten to make the colleges pay them more money.  Colleges are rather the ultimate joke when it comes to hypocrisy.  How ironic that the ObamaCare that they cannot afford will push more of their lower paid faculty into unions that will demand higher pay they cannot afford.  Yet the justice come home to roost upon these bastions of irrationality is really quite sweet.