The Mystery Unravels: Why the University Wants Us to Log Fewer Hours

It’s starting to come together.

At a meeting with Student Government last night, Provost Isaacs and other administrators were asked to explain the new working restrictions that have just been imposed on graduate students.

Here is what we learned: The new restrictions have been imposed because the IRS now requires the University to track our working hours in order to prove that we do not meet the threshold for employee status. If we did, the University would be legally required to provide us with adequate and affordable health insurance. Such are the provisions of the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. the ACA, or Obamacare, signed into law in 2010 as one of the signature victories of the Obama administration. (You can learn more about the Employer Shared Responsibility Provisions of the ACA here.)

Hmmmm. Again, the basic aim of these provisions is to ensure that large employers provide adequate and affordable health insurance to the people who work for them. It would appear, then, that the University of Chicago’s new hourly restrictions are a way to avoid classifying its graduate students as employees.

Mind you, logging fewer hours doesn’t mean working fewer hours. The weekly hour-counts assigned to TAships and lectureships are a gross underestimate of the hours we spend on our duties for these positions. And the hours we’re forced to work at non-University jobs after getting forced off the rolls at our library jobs amount to more labor that’s rendered invisible by the latest accounting trick. Graduate students are full-time employees, alright, but the University has found a way to keep us from appearing on their rolls.

In the words of one GSU member, “So, potentially, the university is cutting hours to keep graduate students out of ACA-mandated benefits, and at the same time, failing to make rising healthcare costs a budgetary priority, pushing more expensive plans onto us. These various problems are looking more like a single issue.”