So a few years ago I got stuck with no health insurance as I had a fellowship that had for its history accepted professors (with health insurance) not fresh off the boat PhDs as was the case with me. Since I was at a Large State school it was nearly impossible for me to get insurance and finally I ended up paying 400 a month and getting a whole lot of headache. In many ways my ordeal was a fluke following a change of policy and this fellowship now provides insurance to its postdocs.
Increasingly, however, it seems like a number of postdoctoral fellowships shirk from their duties and don’t provide a drop of health insurance. Given the academic job market, many academics don’t have any choice but to accept these positions and if they don’t come with insurance, well then these folks are shelling out thousands upon thousands of dollars for basic, really lousy, coverage. Given that universities for the most part have decent, even in some cases kick ass insurance, with a large pool of people, shutting postdocs out of their pool is.. gross and just plain wrong.
One of my fellow friends, currently on the market and currently screwed by her last postdoc wrote up a short document (aka Academic Labor Hall of Shame) and I thought I would post it here as it gets to the heart of the issues and starts shaming some of these shameful universities. If you know of other postdoctoral positions that don’t offer insurance, please please leave a comment. We will include it in the hall of shame.
Academic Labor Hall of Shame
Universities like to promote themselves as bastions of enlightenment, but their treatment of temporary and hidden employees is often anything but enlightened. Or progressive. Or fair.
1. Postdoctoral fellows and researchers:
There is a growing trend towards classing postdocs as “not employees”. I learned this recently when I was laid off from postdoctoral position at the University of Pennsylvania. I planned to extend my health insurance through COBRA, which is currently federally subsidized for workers who lost their jobs during the financial crisis. I was shocked when Penn initially claimed that I was not eligible for the subsidy (made available through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the so-called “stimulus act”). Their reason was that postdocs were not classed by Penn as employees. I appealed this with the Office of General Counsel and after a few weeks was told that I was indeed eligible, as Penn had found “an inconsistency in [their] policy for certain categories of post docs between tax treatment and the availability of COBRA/ARRA”. This means that while I am in fact eligible for this subsidy, postdocs paid through many other classes of grants are still not.
If you want to see an example of this process of sorting some postdocs into “not employee” status, here is another one:
Postdocs on training grants or on individual fellowships (roughly 25% of VUMC postdocs) receive a stipend and are specifically excluded from the employee classification. They do not pay FICA and do not receive employee benefits. Their health insurance is provided and purchased separately. [by whom?]
Even if Vanderbilt does in this case make provisions for these postdocs to receive health insurance, there is abundant evidence that some postdocs are outright excluded, as in this example at Stanford:
Stanford makes no provision for fellows to purchase health insurance, and the Institute will not provide medical insurance or other benefits. External fellows must bring their own medical coverage with them or purchase an individual plan during their stay in California.
This is also quite apparent when you look into the outfits that profit from selling health insurance to postdocs (because their universities don’t provide them any):
http://www.garnett-powers.com/npa/
Also, take a look at the policy they and you’ll note that it stinks: it excludes such luxuries as preventive care, birth control, and chemotherapy. I’m not making this up:
http://www.garnett-powers.com/npa/summary.pdf
I’m a proponent of free enterprise, so I’m accustomed to seeing how any government-designed service (i.e., fleecing of taxpayers, and further erosion of liberties) works out in practice. I left academia partly because I did not want to be party to such theft, no matter how I might otherwise contribute to scientific knowledge.
During my time as a JSPS post-doc at Kyoto University in Japan I had health coverage through the scholarship (monetarily the scholarship is indeed quite excellent even if the Ministry of Justice has to step in regularly with letters since the IRS simply does not believe that it is tax-exempt): however, the health insurance specifically excludes all the ailments marking the type of work the scholarship promotes. Thus, hip and lower back problems, RSI, etc., and their treatment are excluded.
I would suggest that in a free market there would be ample variety in provision for health coverage for post-docs. Nobody can compete with the government though and remain in business.
Comment by Gernot Hassenpflug — December 10, 2009 @ 5:55 pm
This whole question of “are grad students employees?” redounds in a number of other areas, including collective bargaining. I suspect in the past society’s idea of “poor, and needing aid” did not extend to those able to attain college, but in today’s world of deliberate economic diversity through grants and loans, there is probably a subpopulation of college graduates who might need some external aid.
Comment by Charles Cranston — December 11, 2009 @ 8:42 am
Have you see How the University Works? It’s all about the casualization of the university workforce.
Comment by James — December 12, 2009 @ 10:15 pm
Hey James, I do know. His work is great. And thanks Charles indeed. Part of the problem, as I learned at the U of Chicago, is that science phd and postdoc students are treated quite differently from social science and humanities one. They oftne get money through extrenal grants, where the PI writes in money for health insurnace. SS and humanities students are often not funded that way. So at U of C humanities and social science students had to pay for their insurance while the science students did not.
I led a campaign at the U of C, through tactics of shame that would provide health insurance as part of all packages. Though it was not applied retroactively, we did succeed getting the university to provide health insurance to all incoming students.
Comment by Biella — December 13, 2009 @ 7:33 am
One of the major struggles we had in grad school (at Cornell) was over the question of whether grad students were employees, and so had the right to organize and form a union. Since it was in the university’s interest not to have grad students organized–a major motivator for such organization was, guess what, the amazingly shitty health care and housing grad students got–the Admin pushed the view that we were not, ahem, employees, despite being, ahem, formally employed and paid for 20 hours per week as TAs and RAs. It was all part of our *training*. There was also the attempt, when this failed, to dismiss employee status by drawing on a distinction between state and private universities. They surely lost whatever integrity they had in this bankrupt maneouvering.
Comment by Rob Wilson — December 18, 2009 @ 7:17 pm