So, as you've no doubt heard, a modified version of the BRB passed without the required quorum of senators. This is because it is supposedly not a fiscal bill anymore.
It's amazing they could say that with a straight face.
The passage of this bill for me means that I, joe-shmoe TA, will start contributing more than triple my current rate for health insurance. Starting in April, I will start to contribute 10% of my salary (after taxes) for family health insurance, as opposed to the current 3%. Although I get tuition remission, I have to pay segregated fees, which accounts for 12.5% of my salary. Combine that with tithing, I only have about two-thirds of my earnings to spend on things like rent, utilities, food, car and renters insurance, etc. When I was a fellow and making about 1.5 more than a TA, we were able to cover those for the most part while Matt was unemployed. Up until now, we've been able to cover rent with my TA money and part of the utilities and everything else with his earnings. Now my net earnings won't even be able to cover rent. But don't worry though, since I'm not unionized, those mean union bosses won't be able to take out .7% of my salary for dues.
For us, these additional contributions hurt, but we will manage. For families with a sole-breadwinning public employee, these are very damaging. I am concerned for the families in my ward on just one TA income. This problem is of course magnified for full-time employees, who will make increased contributions to health care and also to their pension fund. This is on top of furlough days (TAs are among those exempt from furlough days).
There are many non-directly financial ways that this bill will affect me, which I will address in a separate post.
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4 comments:
Was this about what you expected?
grrrrr
This is what I expected, which is the best case scenario coming out of the brb. Some members of the TA union believe that the university cannot guarantee tuition remission even though the university is saying they can; so if they're right, then the worst case would be I would have to pay tuition on top of health care, which, in the union's worst case scenario, would not be public employee insurance, but crappy student insurance. As of now, neither of those things are happening, so I'm hoping that right now for TAs, the increased insurance cost is the largest burden.
With the Judge's ruling, is all of this set aside?
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