The New Faculty Majority, an advocacy group for adjunct faculty, recently launched the National Unemployment Compensation Initiative. The group is lobbying to change a clause in federal unemployment law that makes it easy to deny contingent faculty unemployment benefits between academic terms.

During the school year, contingent faculty are often denied basic benefits such as health insurance or equitable pay. The New Faculty Majority has just launched a campaign to draw attention to the fact that adjunct faculty are also denied a basic benefit between terms: Unemployment insurance.

Federal unemployment law includes a clause that indicates that faculty with a ‘reasonable assurance of re-employment’ cannot collect unemployment insurance (UI) during scheduled breaks. This standard is intended to prevent instructors who have continuing contracts from collecting both salary and UI, or ‘double-dipping,’ between terms. While contingent faculty rarely have the benefit of continuing contracts, colleges and universities across the country have relied on this same clause to contest their applications for unemployment benefits during winter and summer breaks.

source education-portal.com/articles/