The Employer Shared Responsibility Provisions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA, ObamaCare) require all employers who generally employ 50 full-time workers (or a combination of full-time and part-time that would equal 50 full-time) to provide affordable health insurance coverage. The statute defines a full-time employee as someone who works at least 30 hours per week.
Students who are employed by Harding have rexperienced some changes recently regarding the number of hours they work and how those hours are tracked.
Butch Gardner, director of Career Services, said that Harding regulated student work hours long before the ACA was even enacted.
“Our students have been restricted to 20 hours even before ObamaCare,” Gardner said. “Federal work study restricts students to work only 20 hours per week so the university adopted the same rule.”
David Ross, director of Human Resources, said that in response to the ACA, Harding has kept their limit at 20 hours per week.
“It made sense to keep it at that level in order to keep employees under the new 30 -hour rule,” Ross said. “By allowing students 20 hours during academic periods, not only does it allow them to concentrate on being a student, but if in the summer they needed additional work hours, then it’s available to them to go above that 20.”
Ross said that even though the 20-hour work week is not a new standard at Harding, the university is still undergoing some changes in order to comply with the ACA.
“We are monitoring student hours every week, which is something that we did not used to do,” Ross said. “We need to make sure that the average student hours are in the range that we want them to be. If they’re not, we have to start making plans to either reduce those hours or prepare to comply with the law and offer insurance.”
Debbie Godinez, senior Resident Assistant (RA) in Cathcart Hall, says that the number of desk hours she is allowed to work as an RA has been restricted to 12.
“For me personally I was disappointed to know that our hours are now limited, because I want all the hours that I can get,” Godinez said. “When you leave, you either have to trade desk hours or give them away, and that became so much more difficult when you can only work 12 desk hours. When someone takes off for the weekend and the rest of us are at our quota, there’s no one to fill the empty desk hours. The people that would be willing to take the free desk hours can’t because they’ve reached their limit on hours.”
Ross said that during this time of transition, the university is trying to adapt in the best way possible.
“It’s a sensitive topic for a lot of people so we’re just trying to do the best we can to provide the best services to the students and also protect the interests of the university at the same time,” Ross said.
