Improving conditions for part-timers is a full-time effort

Here’s a thorny dilemma: a school district pays benefits for every employee who works at least  five hours a day. As a result, the district limits many employees to just under five hours. The union bargains hard and gets the district to guarantee all paraprofessionals, for example, at least five hours a day. Because the cost of benefits—especially health insurance—has risen so sharply in recent years, those paraprofessionals are now costing the district more than half of what a teacher makes. Local principals have the authority to make staffing decisions, so they end up spending a little more to hire teachers and cut paraprofessionals.

On the face of it, the local has done a good thing by securing more pay and benefits for paraprofessionals. But in the end, those improvements cost some members their jobs. This isn’t just theory. It’s something that union leaders like Wayne Scott in Colorado are seeing more and more often. “We get caught in this vicious cycle because the cost of benefits packages is so high,” says Scott, executive director of the Colorado Classified School Employees Association and a member of the AFT’s PSRP program and policy council.

A less extreme version of this zero-sum game is played when the union gets the district to set a minimum number of required hours. Food service employees who used to work only four hours a day might get bumped up to five hours, but the district then cuts bus drivers’ hours from six to five, so the bus drivers lose hours and pay while their food service colleagues gain.

In a job sector where huge numbers of PSRPs work part time, it’s a struggle not only for those employees who are paid amounts that don’t even approach a living wage but also for the local unions that are trying to figure out how to do the best for all the workers they represent.

Although those tough local issues were somewhat beyond the scope of its discussions, an AFT task force on part-time and contingent workers looked at the broad picture of what’s happening with this growing sector of the American workforce and recently presented a report that includes a range of findings and recommendations for the AFT at all levels. (See the box on page 5 for specifics.)

Ruby Newbold, an AFT vice president who heads the Detroit Association of Education Office Employees, co-chaired the task force, which included leaders from all five of the AFT’s membership divisions. “This is a large group of workers, but it can be a challenge to represent them,” Newbold says. “We wanted to give our affiliates some strategies to look at with part-time and contingent workers.”

Big growth in part-time jobs

The AFT report points out that about 30 percent of all workers now earn a living in “nonstandard” employment situations, as economists call jobs that aren’t full time or permanent. About 80,000 of them belong to the AFT, but a much larger number of part-time and contingent employees—an estimated 3 million—work in job sectors with AFT members.

Among PSRPs, about 37 percent in elementary and secondary schools and 21 percent in colleges and universities are part-timers. And those numbers have grown dramatically over the past three years, according to an AFT survey of local unions. At the same time, full-time positions are being lost as employers increasingly turn toward lower-cost temporary employees. In some PSRP job segments, including crossing guards and food service employees, well over half work part time (see chart below).

What’s more, a “full-time” job in the PSRP ranks is rarely the 40-hour-per-week position considered standard in the rest of the economy. As the situations described at the beginning of this article indicate, some “full-time” positions might actually offer only 20 hours a week. So even if benefits are offered at that level, the salaries are going to be especially low in jobs already among the lowest-paid in education.

It has gotten to the point in many places where even when benefits are available, many PSRPs can’t afford things like health insurance. “If people are working part time and can’t afford benefits, how will we entice them to come and do those jobs?” asks Val Woods, president of the TOTEM Association of Educational Support Personnel in Alaska, which recently affiliated with the AFT. Her union is the only one out of seven in the Anchorage school system that requires the district to offer employees a no-cost health insurance plan. The deductibles employees pay are very high, of course, but at least they have an option.

Right now, employees in her unit qualify for health benefits if they work five hours a day, but the district has to pay into the state employee retirement system for anyone who works at least three hours (kindergarten paraprofessionals, for example). So even with such a limited workday, Woods reports that many positions have been cut back to just two hours and 45 minutes per day so the district can save on pension contributions. That not only keeps workers out of the retirement system but also makes them ineligible for the union.

Like many school systems around the country, the Anchorage district is facing a budget crunch. More than 80 kindergarten assistants may end up losing their jobs. Woods worries that the district might turn around and replace them with a bunch of two-hour employees. Even with those minimal hours, the district can find people to fill the jobs.

A central role for unions

Personnel decisions, especially in a large school district or college system, can be tough to monitor, but the union needs to stay on top of what’s going on, says Terry Elverum, a California Federation of Teachers (CFT) staffer who served on the AFT task force when he was president of the CFT’s Council of Classified Employees. “The trend I’ve been seeing is that when people are retiring, administrators tend to try to replace them with less-than-full-time positions or hourly positions with no benefits,” he says.

“It’s important for the union to do a regular inventory of the jobs they represent and the number of hours attached to each job,” he urges.

Another role for unions is to make the case to administrators for why it’s a bad idea to keep increasing the number of part-time and temporary workers. Scott says the strategy for PSRP locals in Colorado has moved away from trying to set minimum hours for some jobs because the employer tries to limit workers to just under whatever that threshold might be.

Instead, Scott has discovered that it can be more productive to appeal to administrators’ desire to have highly capable, long-term employees. He can usually look at a district and find one school that has full-time positions for its paraprofessionals and three others that use only part-timers. Almost without fail, the full-time paras will be stable employees with 15 or 20 years on the job, Scott says, while the part-time positions tend to be filled by a string of short-timers.

Woods sees the same pattern in Alaska. “My fantasy,” she says, “is that we can get more people and they’ll stay longer if we offer them benefits.”

There’s nothing wrong with part-time work if the employee chooses the arrangement. But as the AFT report notes, part-time and contingent workers shouldn’t have to work for substandard pay, benefits and conditions.