Part-Time Profs Fight For Unemployment Checks Locke Expected To Resist Lobbying, Sign Legislation Tightening Benefits

Part-time community college teachers in Washington are urging Gov. Gary Locke to veto a bill that may make it tougher to collect summer unemployment checks.

The newly formed Part-Time Faculty Organization said Tuesday that a bill overwhelmingly approved by the Legislature could be used to deny adjunct faculty $2.6 million in annual unemployment benefits.

“This is insane,” said Green River Community College philosophy teacher Keith Hoeller, who founded the part-timers group. “We’re the only temporary workers who have trouble getting unemployment. Construction workers and farm workers don’t have these problems.”

Locke has not given an opinion on Substitute House Bill 2947, but most observers expect him to sign it into law.

The measure could affect the state’s 10,500 adjunct faculty, a group three times larger than all the full-time community college teachers.

Opponents said the bill eliminates guarantees that part-time teachers are eligible for unemployment checks during summer quarter, when colleges reduce course offerings and need fewer teachers.

That could mean the loss of $520 per month in unemployment payments to a part-time teacher earning $13,000 per year.

But a lobbyist with the Employment Security Department said the agency will continue to pay unemployment benefits to qualified teachers.

“The clear message (from the Legislature) was to stay on the same track,” Graeme Sackrison said.

Employment Security and the teachers unions will pound out language this spring to determine which educators will be eligible for unemployment, Sackrison said. If signed by the governor, the law would go into effect in June, just as summer quarter begins.

Employment Security lobbied hard for the bill after U.S. Labor Secretary Alexis Herman threatened to deny $952 million in federal tax credits and operating funds if Washington failed to drop special provisions for part-time teachers.

But the Legislature went beyond Herman’s demands. It removed a definition adopted in 1995 to clarify the difference between full-time teachers under contract and part-time instructors who, like seasonal farm workers, have no “reasonable assurance” of employment from quarter to quarter.

One Spokane Community College teacher said adjunct faculty who do not apply for unemployment usually find temporary summer jobs to carry them through the quarter.

“We have no cushion, no safety net at all,” said the teacher, who, fearing retaliation from the union and administration, asked that her name not be used. “We don’t just waltz out there every summer and get some flashy job editing a magazine.”

, DataTimes