Opportunities for Part-time Staff and Adjunct Faculty Created by Healthcare Reform

By Gary L. Miller

In the Summer 2009 HR and Mission Discussion Forum, Sister Carol Keehan, DC, president and CEO of the Catholic Health Association of the United States wrote:

Catholic employers in particular should support a reformed [healthcare] system not only because of the economic consequences but because of the social justice implications. As a matter of human dignity, everyone is entitled to health care. Like any basic element of life, health care sustains us and should always be accessible and affordable for everyone—when they need it, where they need it, no exceptions, no interruptions.

With the passage of Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) last March, we are much closer to this goal of accessible and affordable healthcare for everyone. Colleges and universities that employ part-time staff and adjunct faculty may find this extension of coverage particularly pertinent. A survey conducted by the American Federation of Teachers found that only 28% of adjuncts report having health insurance provided through their college employer (Inside Higher Ed Online, March 22, 2010); this suggests that part-time employees at these institutions may be one source of the uninsured population.

When the PPACA-required state insurance exchanges become operational in 2014, many of those who are not currently eligible for an employer health plan and cannot afford an individual policy, or are denied insurance because of a pre-existing health condition, will find their situation dramatically improved. Through the state exchanges, they will have guaranteed access to comprehensive medical coverage with premiums that cannot be based on their health status. Additionally, those with family incomes at or below 400% of the Federal Poverty Level (FPL) will be eligible to receive premium subsidies. Those in the lowest income bracket eligible for government assistance with exchange-purchased insurance will pay a maximum premium of 3% of their household income with the balance being subsidized. As income levels escalate, the premium share required of participants gradually increases as a percent of household income to a maximum of 9.5%. For individuals and families at or under 250% of the FPL, government assistance will also be provided to offset plan out-of-pocket plan costs, such as deductibles and co-insurance.

Does PPACA fully resolve the health insurance access issues for part-time staff and adjunct faculty or must more be done? More must be done.

The Gap

Individuals with household incomes that exceed 400% of the FPL (roughly $46,000 for a single individual in 2014) will not be eligible for government-subsidized health insurance. Because part-time staff are typically paid on an hourly basis and adjuncts are frequently paid by the number of classes they teach, those part-timers who do the most work for their employers are also the most likely to become ineligible for the subsidy.

Having to pay the full premium for health insurance might not be too much of a problem for younger part-time employees, but it could be a challenge for older ones. For instance, the Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that in 2014, an exchange-purchased medical insurance plan for a single 35-year-old will run $3,962 annually in a medium cost region. However, because health plans on the state exchanges will be allowed to charge more for older employees, the full premium for a 55-year-old purchasing insurance on the exchange is estimated to be $8,495, not including out-of-pocket costs, such as deductibles and coinsurance.

So, in 2014, if a college or university only allows full-time faculty and staff into its group health plan, most of its part-timers will still be able to secure high-quality, well subsidized coverage through a state insurance exchange because the most that a subsidy-eligible individual will have to pay is 9.5% of his or her household income. Consider the 55-year-old we discussed above facing a premium of $8,495. Had this individual earned just a little less, say $45,000 (which is less than 400% of the FPL as of 2014) the premium would drop to a much more affordable amount - $4,275 - because of the government subsidy.

To re-cap, if a college or university does not provide group health plan coverage to part-time employees in 2014, most of them will still have access to affordable high-quality health plans through the state exchanges. However, those relatively few part-time staff and adjunct faculty with incomes that exceed 400% of the FPL may still have difficulty securing medical coverage.

The Challenge

What is a solution for a college or university that wants to close this gap without incurring the cost of covering part-time employees who have access to affordable high-quality coverage through a state exchange?

A Possible Solution

One possible solution is to create a separate group health plan for part-time staff and adjunct faculty who work at least a half-time schedule. This new plan would be designed like the type of plan on the exchange on which the government subsidy amounts are based (for those who are interested, this would be a plan that pays, on average, 70% of the cost of the covered benefits).

With most large employers, full-time employees pay a percent of the medical plan premium, usually 20 to 30%. The full-time plan would be unaffected and could continue to be structured in this way.

Those in the new part-time plan, however, would have different contribution rules. Their premium contributions would be based on a percent of household income, just as the premiums charged for insurance on the state exchanges will be based on a percent of household income. As stated above, for insurance purchased through an exchange, those in the lowest income bracket eligible for government assistance will pay a maximum premium of 3% of their household income with the balance being subsidized. As income increases, the premium required of participants gradually increases to a maximum of 9.5% of income. Also remember that the exchange subsidy is only available for those earning 400% or less of the FPL (roughly $46,000 for a single individual in 2014).

The percent of household income that would be charged for participating in the university part-time classification health plan would be a flat 10%. This is just slightly higher than the maximum premium of 9.5% required for insurance purchased through a state exchange.

Generally, PPACA does not allow employees who have access to an employer group plan to receive subsidized (both the premium subsidy and the cost-sharing subsidy) insurance on the state insurance exchanges. However, PPACA allows an exception for employees who have to pay more than 9.5% of their household income for employer coverage. Under the proposed plan, the premium cost for part-timers would be 10% of their household income; as such, eligibility for this new employer plan would not disqualify them from purchasing medical insurance through a state exchange and receiving the government premium subsidies discussed above.

The Outcome

With this new arrangement, most part-time employees would have to pay more for the university part-time plan (10% of income) than they would have to pay for insurance purchased through a state insurance exchange (remember that the maximum premium on the exchange is 9.5% of income and even less for lower-income individuals who would also be eligible for assistance with deductibles and co-insurance). The result: most part-time employees would not seek coverage in the university’s part-time plan because the exchange would be a better deal.

With this solution, the university would have a plan for those part-timers who need it; most typically, those who would not be eligible for subsidized coverage on the exchange. Recall the 55-year-old discussed earlier with an annual income of $46,000 facing an unsubsidized exchange premium of $8,495. The annual premium for this individual in the university’s plan by comparison would be much more affordable - $4,600 – putting healthcare within financial reach.

Why should a college or university make this effort to ensure that this small portion of their part-time employee population has access to affordable coverage? Given that these particular employees would be working at least a half-time schedule with many probably working closer to a full-time schedule, they are significant contributors to the colleges and universities where they are making this level of commitment. Moreover, because of the amount of work they are performing for their primary employer, even those with second jobs are unlikely to be making a level of commitment to their secondary employers that would qualify them for medical benefits. Beyond this, however, the new healthcare law envisions the federal government, state governments, insurers and large employers (those with more than 50 employees) all working together to achieve the important goal of near-universal medical coverage, a goal that serves the common good of the entire country. Because we know the government isn’t going to be helping these part-timers who fall in this gap, their access to health insurance becomes the responsibility of employers.

Although only a few part-time employees are likely to elect this special part-time health plan because of the required half-time commitment and because the subsidies make plans available through the state exchanges more attractive for those eligible for government assistance, the solution proposed in this column would nevertheless result in higher benefits costs for employers that currently do not extend affordable group medical plan coverage to part-timers. For this reason alone, some employers would reject this arrangement. However, I believe that most mission-based employers are interested in exploring ways to coordinate their internal strategies with PPACA’s vision of nearly universal healthcare coverage and will seize this opportunity created by the new law to help make healthcare “accessible and affordable for everyone—when they need it, where they need it, no exceptions, no interruptions.”

The opinions expressed in this column are mine alone and do not represent the opinions of DePaul University.
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The healthcare subsidy amounts were derived using the calculator on the Kaiser Family Foundation website: http://healthreform.kff.org/subsidycalculator.aspx .The March 22, 2010 Inside Higher Ed article mentioned above is available here: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/03/22/adjunct.

As always, we invite our readers to enter into this dialogue by sharing their thoughts and experiences, as well as their practical and effective solutions, on any of the topics we address in our columns. To facilitate this, we have a blog – http://hr-forum-ccu.blogspot.com/ - where readers can comment on this column or any of our past columns. Craig Mousin, who regularly co-authors this column with me, will post his comments on the blog. We hope you do as well.

Also, you may contact us directly via email with your comments and ideas for the column at hrforumccu@gmail.com. Finally, please consider joining our Linkedin group and participating in group discussions at
http://www.linkedin.com/groups?mostPopular=&gid=2491350&trk=myg_ugrp_ovr .

Becoming the New Operating System

HR and Mission
Gary Miller and Rev. Craig B. Mousin

We dedicate this column to the topic of Sustainable Development in Catholic colleges and universities and invite you to consider how we can further that critical goal in our work within Human Resources. We are honored to have as our guest columnist, Scott Kelley, Ph.D. Scott Kelley is Assistant Vice-President for Vincentian Scholarship in the Office of Mission and Values at DePaul University. Prior to his current position, he was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Religious Studies Department and Research Fellow at the DePaul University Institute for Business and Professional Ethics. He is a co-author of Alleviating Poverty through Profitable Partnerships: Globalization, Markets, and Economic Well-Being (New York: Routledge 2009) and various articles on poverty alleviation, Catholic social teaching, Vincentian heritage, sustainability, and moral discernment.


Becoming the New Operating System

Scott P. Kelley, PhD

August 4, 2010

The environmentalist Paul Hawken issued a daunting challenge to University of Portland’s graduating class of 2009: “you are going to have to figure out what it means to be a human being on earth at a time when every living system is declining, and the rate of decline is accelerating … the earth needs a new operating system, you are the programmers, and we need it within a few decades.” The notion of developing a new operating system succinctly captures many of the challenges facing higher education across the globe, a challenge most often addressed to the world’s elite universities such as Harvard, MIT, or Oxford. However, Paul Hawken’s choice to deliver this address to the graduates of a relatively small Catholic College in the Pacific Northwest is quite revealing. He may have known that Catholic higher education has “secretly” been working on this new operating system for decades.

A sober diagnosis of the situation we are in today – as humans living on planet earth – is deeply disturbing. Our professional colleagues in environmental science tell us by consensus that human-caused climate change is a reality, that our climate is on the cusp of entering historically unprecedented territory, that our pattern of resource consumption is fundamentally unsustainable, and that the consequences of the “old operating system” are likely to disrupt civilization in profound and drastic ways. As the global population continues its explosive growth, it will plateau some time around the year 2050 at roughly 9 billion people. Most of that growth will come in the mega-slums of the developing world, where hungry farmers and fisherman have come to eek out an existence. Considering that India has a middle class larger than the entire population of the United States, it is not difficult to imagine that if the current patterns of resource consumption continue unabated, we will need 3 to 5 planets to sustain it. Hawken is quite correct about the need for a new operating system, but as Albert Einstein warned decades ago, “we can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” In short, we need more than technological innovation – we need a new way of thinking about our challenges, our sources of meaning, our way of being.

Before looking into the new operating system itself, it is quite revealing to look at the kinds of people who develop operating systems – Bill Gates and Steve Jobs being the most notable. The usual story of Gates’ success is familiar: bored by Harvard, a young math whiz drops out of college to start a little company called Microsoft with his friends. But that is only a small part of a larger story, as Malcolm Gladwell argues in Outliers: the Story of Success. When Gates was in seventh grade in 1968, the mothers’ club invested money in a computer terminal that linked to a mainframe in downtown Seattle at a time when few college campuses even had computers. Gates began real-time programming only three years after some of the very basic computing infrastructure had just been developed; he had years of trial-and-error experience well before he set foot on Harvard’s campus. Although not from a wealthy family, Steve Jobs grew up in Mountain View, California and would drop in on evening talks given by Hewlett-Packard engineers, often staying after for a few questions and even requesting spare parts on occasion. He eventually got a job on an assembly line building computers, so he learned how to build them with his hands. Their stories indicate that in addition to their individual vision and talent, both innovators were exposed to and lived in communities of innovators. In short, innovation is mostly the fruit of cumulative and progressive adjustments over extended periods of time and less about the individual qualities of its pioneers.

Now back to the operating system itself. Paul Hawken’s desire for a new operating system is often captured by the umbrella term sustainable development, which has been around for some time. Concerned by the accelerating deterioration of the human environment and natural resources and the consequences of that deterioration for economic and social development, the United Nations issued Our Common Future (aka, the Brundtland Report) in 1983 to explore development “that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” Since then, many have argued that sustainable development must successfully address social, environmental, and economic growth (or people, planet, profits) without depleting natural capital for future generations.

Paul Hawken could have addressed his challenge to any of the four great shapers of culture: corporations, churches, governments, or universities. He may have chosen to address an institution of higher education because he believes, as do many of us, that higher education has the comparative autonomy, the intellectual freedom, and the necessary resources to grope its way toward a new operating system. Institutions of higher education – especially Catholic higher education - are privileged communities for this new operating system to be developed.

The notion of sustainable development is no stranger to the Catholic intellectual tradition or to the educational mission of Catholic Universities. Catholic social teaching, taken in its entirety, has long provided a coherent vision for meeting the needs of the present without compromising the needs of future generations. As Pope John Paul II noted in Ex Corde Ecclessie, Catholic Universities are “called on to become an ever more effective instrument of cultural progress for individuals as well as for society.” They do this, in part, by examining “a new economic and political order that will better serve the human community at a national and international level” (32). The intellectual vision for a new operating system, however, is not just an exercise of the imagination or a distant aspiration – it a collection of insights that come from practice.

Institutions of Catholic higher education must become sustainable learning communities themselves if they are to teach – and live out – the vision of Catholic social teaching. Toward the end of his life, Vincent de Paul began to write the Common Rules for the Congregation of the Mission long after the community had been living out its mission to serve the spiritual and material needs of the poor. He justified this pragmatic approach by noting that Jesus himself “put things into practice before He made them part of His teaching.” In the same way, institutions of Catholic higher education must become sustainable learning communities at their very CORE - through curriculum, operations, research, and engagement. As such, they also have an operational aspect to their mission that is a context for, experience of, and community witness to the vision of Catholic social teaching. Students exposed from a young age to concerns about social issues and the environment are looking for educational opportunities that will enable them to pursue meaningful careers to address them. Such opportunities are only possible in communities that live, breath, and speak the values that will form the new operating system.

Institutions of Catholic higher education are sizable economies. They employ, contract, purchase, invest, and participate in the global economy with considerable resources when examined collectively. Today there are nearly 220 Catholic colleges and universities with combined annual operating expenses of more than $14 billion and net assets valued at nearly $35 billion in fiscal year 2007. If such economies of scale were to carefully follow the principles of Catholic social teaching – to the best of their abilities – they can establish, test, adjust, and inspire innovation for creating this new operating system.

While operational missions cover many different activities, there are a few areas that deserve special consideration. The primary way that Catholic institutions live out their operational mission is through management practices and human resources. Catholic institutions must embody the values envisioned in Catholic social teaching if they are to educate, hire, develop, and retain the talented people who are essential for creating a sustainable learning community. The way we hire new employees, evaluate their work, and give them the freedom to develop new practices will not only contribute to the flourishing of each employee but will also enable management to be good stewards of institutional resources, all of which is consistent with Catholic Social Teaching and sustainable development. Like the forward thinking mother’s club that bought a computer for Bill Gates’ school or the community of HP engineers that inspired Steve Jobs - the new operating system will only be developed in a community that values developing one. In addition, by acting as contractors institutions of Catholic higher education can influence the development of new forms of the management-labor partnership that will preserve and enhance their sizeable workforces.

Just as worship space conveys the importance of liturgy and ritual, so too can buildings become public symbols of sustainable development and smaller carbon footprints without sacrificing function or utility – “the garages” within which software developers innovate. Resource conservation – from energy to water to paper – should be a hallmark of the sustainable learning community, where a renewed commitment to living simply should be a common experience for students, faculty, staff, and guests. The problem of climate change-induced displacement should serve as a stark reminder that the developed world’s massive carbon footprint stands on the necks of the poor.

Procurement is another important aspect of a Catholic institution’s operational mission, where purchasing choices – from coffee to computers – are important instances of a preferential option for the poor and for the creation of a just society in a globalized economy. Individually and collectively, institutions of Catholic higher education can make a significant impact on global supply chains by establishing consistent markets for things like Fair Trade products.

Lastly, investment strategies should reflect a commitment to the principles of Catholic social teaching. Recent research indicates that there is no trade off between socially responsible investing and financial performance, an argument that has long prevented endowment managers from considering it seriously.

Developing anything “new” – especially an operating system – rarely involves the discovery or creation of something totally foreign by a single visionary. More often than not, innovation is merely the identification of new applications and new uses for well-established concepts in a community that nurtures and cherishes them. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs exercised incredible imagination, but the intellectual spark and the physical material for their innovation already existed in their communities. The new operating system that Paul Hawken imagines should not be viewed as something adventitious to the mission of Catholic higher education, or some radical new innovation. Instead, the new operating system of the sustainable learning community should be viewed as a 21st century application of the Church’s best kept secret. As sustainable learning communities, institutions of Catholic higher education can serve as the garages where communities of innovators grope their way toward a sustainable future.



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Works Referenced

“The Unforgettable Commencement” address by Paul Hawken to the Class of 2009, University of Portland, May 3, 2009.

On the sober diagnosis of our current situation: Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It. New York: Melcher Media, 2006; Stuart Hart, Capitalism at the CrossRoads: The Unlimited Business Opportunities in Solving the World's Most Difficult Problems. New Jersey: Wharton School Publishing, 2007; Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York: Penguin Books, 2005; Herman Daly, Beyond Growth. Boston: Beacon Press, 1996; Sachs, Jeffrey D. 2005. The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time. New York: Penguin Press.

Developers of operating systems. Gladwell, Malcolm. 2008. Outliers: The Story of Success (Kindle Edition). Little, Brown and Company.

Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development: Our Common Future (aka the Bruntland Commission) available at http://www.un-documents.net/wced-ocf.htm ; Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins, Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution available at http://www.natcap.org/

Four great shapers of culture: Thomas Berry, The Great Work: Our Way Into The Future. New York: Bell Tower, 1999. On sustainability in higher education: David Orr, Earth in Mind: On Education, Environment, and the Human Prospect. Washington DC: Island Press, 1994

Pope John Paul II, Ex Corde Ecclessiae available at
http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/apost_constitutions/documents/hf_jp-ii_apc_15081990_ex-corde-ecclesiae_en.html


“He put things into practice before He made them part of His teaching” from the Common Rules of the Congregation of the Mission (May 17, 1658), available at http://via.library.depaul.edu/cm_construles/3/ ; Sustainable Learning Community and CORE: John Aber, Tom Kelley, and Bruce Mallory, the Sustainable Learning Community: one university’s journey to the future. New Hampshire: University of New Hampshire Press, 2009. Operational mission: Charles R. Strain, “In Service of Whom?: The Impact of Vincentian Universities' Institutional Investment Practices on Global Poverty” in Vincentian Heritage Journal (28:2), available at http://via.library.depaul.edu/vhj/vol28/iss2/13/

“Sizable economies”: Richard Yanikoski, “Catholic Higher Education: the Untold Story” in Origins (39:36), February 2010.

Climate change-induced displacement: “But What Can I Do for You?” Archbishop Veglio’s Address to Conference of US Bishops, May 31, 2010 available at http://www.zenit.org/article-29422?l=english ; “Who’s under your carbon footprint?” St Francis pledge available at http://catholicclimatecovenant.org/the-st-francis-pledge/ ; Socially responsible investing: Fatemi, Ali, Iraj J. Fooladi, and David Wheeler. 2009. The Relative Valuation of Socially Responsible Firms: An Exploratory Study. In FranCois Lepineux & Henri-Claude de Bettignies (Eds), Finance for a Better World: The Shift Toward Sustainability. Palgrave Macmillan Publishers.


As always, we invite our readers to enter into this dialogue by sharing their thoughts and experiences, as well as their practical and effective solutions, on any of the topics we address in our columns. To facilitate this, we have a blog – http://hr-forum-ccu.blogspot.com/ - where readers can comment on this column or any of our past columns. Also, you may contact us directly via email with your comments and ideas for the column at hrforumccu@gmail.com. Finally, please consider joining our group on Linkedin – Human Resource Management and Mission: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?mostPopular=&gid=2491350 and sharing your thoughts, experiences and solutions with the group.

We encourage your feedback to begin our collective attention to these issues. We would like to post links to your mission statements as well as HR and compensation philosophy documents if you would like to share them with our readers. This will permit a fuller discussion of how mission and CST enters into the employment process. Please let us know if you would like us to link to any of your institution’s documents.

Define Dignity: Catholic Institutions and Bullying in the Workplace

Rev. Craig B. Mousin

To read the research, bullying in the workplace throughout the United States has reached alarming proportions. Some claim that bullying impacts one in six workers. Research on faculty bullying leads to similar conclusions suggesting that the particularities of the academy nurture a thriving environment for bullies. In a recent article reviewing academic bullying, “Faculty Experiences with Bullying in Higher Education,” Loraleigh Keashly and Joel H. Neuman reported that “the rates of bullying seem relatively high when compared to those noted in the general population.” Nor is bullying unique to the United States as the European Union, and France especially, have explored solutions to tame harassing and demeaning treatment of employees. Workplace stress, absenteeism, and stifled initiative all may stem from bullying.

Based on Catholic Social Teaching, many mission statements of Catholic institutions find their grounding in human dignity to inspire education, service, and employment relations. The idea of ennobling the dignity of our co-workers resonates positively in mission statements, but to what end operationally if dignity remains isolated in the mission statement and unused as a management tool? Naming dignity as essential to a Catholic institution’s mission, but failing to define it as an operative part of employee relations may cause more damage than not including it within the mission statement in the first place. Does not honoring dignity while ignoring its trespass in the day-to-day administration of employees undermine institutional efforts to serve the common good?

Many argue that it does not. Instead some contend that remaining competitive today necessitates strong management that might be misinterpreted. Sports metaphors adorn management styles. “Nice guys finish last” has generally been attributed to former Chicago Cubs Coach Leo Durocher. (Although allegedly aimed at the opposing team, Durocher’s Cubs have now passed over a century without winning the World Series, suggesting even sports metaphors may be improper guides.) Should toughness on the athletic field translate into the workplace? In a competitive global world, where margins rule the day, do we need the acute edge of the driven manager squeezing all out of the workforce to remain at the top of their game? The competitive manager may elide into the bullying manager when the game is on the line.

Such unfortunate manager transformations may occur or remain unresolved because bullying is so difficult to define and prove. Federal and local laws have assisted management in understanding the parameters of illegal discrimination or harassment based on protected categories, but bullying becomes harder to define absent a protected category. Most researchers emphasize repeated mistreatment by one or more employees aimed at a specific employee as the core of bullying. If additional employees target a vulnerable employee, their conduct becomes a subset of improper conduct called mobbing. The power a manager has over an employee’s career, especially in employment at will workplaces, makes it difficult to discern when the manager demanding accountability crosses over to repeated mistreatment of employees, at least according to those who claim that developing anti-bullying policies are too difficult.

As modern management seeks greater productivity through reliance on technology with fewer employees, demands on all employees increase. Denial of bullying precludes accurate demarcation of the line distinguishing the demanding manager from the demeaning manager. Human Resources professionals seem to know conduct that meets the definition of insubordination when an employee acts out against a manager, thus meriting termination. When a manager exploits the power of position to constantly demean an employee, however, do those same leaders possess similar tools to address bullying? We certainly know it when physical violence crosses the line, but what of the daily communications in the workplace? Although physical violence also crosses into potential criminal behavior, addressing non-physical violence must also be a priority. Human history has revealed that violence over the mind and spirit can damage a person as much as physical pain.

In addition, the difficulty in actually witnessing the alleged bullying or mobbing, the fear of reporting bullying, the difficulty in assessing the truth from two conflicting assessments, the difficulty in discerning if a one-time harsh word implicates a greater concern and reveals a pattern and practice of harm, all increase the challenges of addressing the problem. The academic world faces particularly complicated issues. Some of its greatest strengths tend to work against mitigating faculty bullying. Keashly and Neuman pose the following dilemma: “collegiality and autonomy are critical for academic freedom and the work of the academic, yet these norms are interpreted as preventing action to address what faculty view as problematic behaviors that, in turn, create a climate of noncollegiality, hostility, and incivility, increasing the likelihood of bullying and mobbing.” Given such parameters, developing an anti-bullying procedure that protects all parties faces extensive challenges.

Dignity also requires fairness in procedures to protect against false claims and a rebound mobbing against alleged bullies if charges are not managed properly. Mary Rowe, Linda Wilcox and Howard Gadlin remind us that workplaces need training in conflict resolution to provide managers with the tools necessary to demand accountability without straying into bullying behavior or discouraging employees from reporting bullying behavior. Fair procedures that encourage reporting, but accord fair treatment to all parties, discourage false claims, and provide incentives to seek win-win solutions are required. Rowe, Wilcox, and Gadlin suggest implementing informal solutions such as Ombuds Offices which offer safe harbors for both employees and managers to explore options that serve the employees and the mission. Finally, they propose all parties should expand their curiosity to research why bullies exist so that the environment can be modified to eliminate the sources of bullying while protecting the valuable contributions of all.

Addressing bullying in the workplace may further prove the value of Catholic Social Teaching with regard to employment. One General Counsel and Director of Human Resources at a for-profit corporation reported that he worked with a senior manager who seemed indispensable to the company’s success. Unfortunately, that senior manager persistently bullied and humiliated subordinates. When the senior manager was finally terminated, the relief in the business was almost palpable; it seemed like a huge rock had been lifted from everyone’s shoulders. And most surprising, employees at all levels in the company, particularly middle managers, suddenly flourished and brought new ideas and programs to the workplace once freed of fear of the demeaning boss. Catholic Social teaching encourages developing the full human potential of all workers. In furthering the dignity of each colleague in the workplace, the environment then encouraged the flourishing of the human spirit and human capability.

Mission matters. Keashly and Newman’s review of bullying literature reveals that an “organization’s culture and related climate play an important role in the manifestation of hostile behaviors at work.” Defining dignity’s operational role in the workplace may serve to counteract bullying that might otherwise be tolerated. Finally, if defining bullying proves too difficult, what Martha Nussbaum suggests in another context, may be helpful for those seeking to increase mission’s impact on the cultural climate. In writing about justice, she recommends “we need to have some sense of what it is to respect human dignity, of what treatment human dignity requires from the world, if we are to be clear about what treatment violates it.” If we move from the world stage to the employment context, what does it mean to honor the dignity of employees? What treatment of human dignity may we expect from a Catholic employer? By starting with defining what works to foster dignity, it may become clearer what actions by managers or co-employees may violate dignity and offer solutions how to mitigate bullying in the workplace.

We invite you to respond to this column through our blog at http://hr-forum-ccu.blogspot.com/ to help define dignity in the workplace. What must we expect from each other to honor the dignity of all employees? We look forward to your responses.

We invite you to post links of your mission statements as well as HR and compensation philosophy documents on our blog if you would like to share them with our readers. This will permit a fuller discussion of how mission and CST influence the employment process. Please let us know if you would like us to link to any of your institution’s documents.

The opinions expressed in this column are mine alone and do not represent DePaul University’s.

June 8, 2010

Resources relied upon in preparing this column include:
The paper reviewing research on faculty bullying by Loraleigh Keashly and Joel H. Neuman, “Faculty Experiences with Bullying in Higher Education,” can be found in Administrative Theory & Praxis, March 2010, Vol. 32, No. 1, 48, 50, 59, 60.
Information on the extent of bullying including the one in six workers statistic can be found in Gary Namie and Ruth Namie, The Bully at Work, What You Can Do to Stop the Hurt and Reclaim Your Dignity on the Job, (Naperville, Il, Sourcebooks, 2003), 11.

The website http://www.workplacebullying.org/ (accessed on June 7, 2010) contains information on efforts in 17 states to legislate safe workplace laws that seek to define bullying behavior and control bullying against employees.

Mary Rowe, Linda Wilcox, and Howard Gadlin make their suggestions in “Dealing with—or Reporting—‘Unacceptable’ Behavior (With additional thoughts on the ‘Bystander Effect’)” found in the Journal of the International Ombudsman Association, vol. 2, number 1, 2009, 52, 54, 62-3.

For a discussion of bullying in the European Union and France, see Claire Stievenard’s “France’s Approach to Workplace ‘Bullying’” in Workforce Management, http://www.workforce.com/section/03/feature/27/06/88/index_printer.html
(accessed on June 7, 2010).

Martha C. Nussbaum’s quote on justice and dignity can be found in Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership, (Cambridge, Ma, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), 277.

403(b) Retirement Plans and Socially Responsible Investments

By Gary L. Miller and Rev. Craig B. Mousin

It started with what seemed to be a fairly innocent phone call from a faculty member to the Human Resources director at St. Anywhere Catholic College. The professor explained that she recently attended a meeting where some faculty had inquired whether the college’s endowments were invested in socially responsible funds. This aroused her curiosity about the college’s 403(b) retirement plan - she wanted to know whether the college’s 403(b) plan used socially responsible criteria in banning inappropriate mutual funds from its core investment options. The director, fresh from his most recent meeting with the Board of Trustees Finance Committee, explained that only highly rated funds were made available in the plan and that participants could choose from among a number of excellent funds to direct their retirement plan contributions. Moreover, there were at least two available funds in every major asset class. He pointed out that the Board of Director’s Investment Committee had taken great strides over the past few years to satisfy its fiduciary responsibilities and that each of the funds in the core investment menu met the college’s stringent investment policy criteria. For a mutual fund to be considered for the retirement plan investment platform it had to have a proven track record of high performance relative to its asset class benchmark, a history of consistent management, and low fees. Not only that, even the funds that were available through the retirement plan were reviewed quarterly by the investment committee. Funds that dropped below the college’s investment quality standards were replaced by better-performing funds. The professor replied that she wasn’t referring to investment performance. Rather, she was concerned that some of the key holdings of some of the mutual funds were companies with highly questionable business practices seemingly contrary to the college’s mission and Catholic Social Teaching.

He responded that the law is the law and because the college’s retirement plan could not be considered a church plan, the plan was subject to the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA). As such, he explained that the college has a fiduciary responsibility to act in the sole interest of plan participants rather than in the interest of any particular sub-group in the college community with particular political or moral leanings. He further explained that this fiduciary responsibility included the requirement that the investment committee follow prudent investment practices in selecting and retaining funds in order to best protect the participants’ retirement accounts. She pointed out that, in terms of pension investments, the law has been gradually recognizing that fiduciary duty may include recognizing that socially responsible screens might increase investment returns. She called his attention to a recent report from the Social Investment Forum that two-thirds of socially responsible mutual funds outperformed their 2009 benchmarks despite last year’s economic tailspin. If that was the case, she wondered, would the college’s fiduciary role suggest an affirmative duty to offer such socially responsible funds?

The director noted the college does in fact offer employees a socially responsible fund option. He recalled that, among the faculty, this fund was one of the most popular options in terms of the amount of money invested in it. She thanked him for that option, but narrowed her question to whether a Catholic college should have an even higher standard than a generic social investment fund. She noted that Pope John Paul II had written that investment choices were always moral decisions and with the employer matching part of the employee’s contribution, did that not impose a moral responsibility on the college? She wanted to know why the college would allow employees to exercise immoral choices or would even invest its matching contributions into such immoral choices. Initially rebuffed by what he took to be a personal critique of his integrity, the director responded that “immoral” is a highly subjective term and that all of the mutual funds were highly reputable. She replied that the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops issued guidelines for socially responsible investing. In addition, their pastoral letter, Economic Justice for All, stated, “The ways these resources are invested and managed must be scrutinized in light of their effects on non-monetary values. Investment and management decisions have crucial moral dimensions: they create jobs or eliminate them; they can push vulnerable families over the edge into poverty or give them new hope for the future; they help or hinder the building of a more equitable society.” (Par. 92. c.) Although expressing a need to exercise both prudence and justice in developing investment strategies, the guidelines explicitly excluded some investments, called for divestment in others and challenged Catholic investors to actively encourage companies to become involved in certain social justice policies. She saw none of these recommendations incorporated in the 403(b) plan’s Investment Policy Statement regarding fund selection, although she acknowledged that the one social investment fund did have a list of screens and did encourage some shareholder activity to change corporate policy. Although he was aware of the bishop’s guidelines, the director countered that first of all, the bishop’s guidelines were intended only for the conference’s direct investments. The director also argued that investing in a mutual fund is fundamentally different than directly investing in a company. A participant who directs retirement plan contributions into a mutual fund doesn’t actually buy direct ownership in the companies whose stock is owned by that fund. Practically speaking, given that a mutual fund’s portfolio could consist of shares representing scores of different companies with the mix of stocks constantly in flux, it would be impossible to monitor any fund’s underlying investments for nebulous moral criteria. Finally, the director noted that any attempt to screen investments along moral or political lines would run afoul of the college’s emphasis on diversity. The institution’s faculty and staff held a multitude of political views and religious affiliations on a correspondingly wide range of moral and social justice issues. He feared that it would be impossible to navigate all those choices.

The professor would not relent. She insisted that the fact that the college was utilizing prudent investment practices in selecting and monitoring the funds available to participants in the 403(b) retirement plan did not make these practices sufficient. She went on to argue that the investment options in the 403(b) plan should be additionally evaluated against the college’s mission statement that emphasizes the God-given dignity of every human being and education for all to enhance the common good. She noted that the principles in the college’s mission statement represented basic values that all the faculty and staff accept simply by virtue of working for the institution. She raised the question of whether the college had a fiduciary duty to act in a manner consistent with its mission. The director responded that the mission statement provided guidance to the university’s academic activities rather than specifically regulating its internal business practices which must follow civil law. “There’s the rub,” the professor countered, asking whether mission should be pigeonholed in a way that made the university’s operational business decisions irrelevant to their impact on society. Would not the director’s response fly directly counter to the bishop’s concern that investments should further a more equitable society?

She went on to argue that, even beyond the role of mission, the common good must be a primary consideration in all investment decisions. To this comment the director exclaimed that providing excellent investment options to help ensure that employees can retire with dignity promoted the common good most effectively. Realizing that she was not making any progress, she asked the director if there could at least be some way to let employees know of the business practices they were supporting with their investment dollars. When the director indicated that employees are provided with a prospectus for each of the available funds, the professor replied that this was insufficient. In addition to knowing the major holdings of a mutual fund, plan participants had a right to know how these companies whose stocks comprised those holdings operate in regard to moral and ecological factors: Do the companies manufacture and/or distribute harmful products? Do they operate sweatshops oversees? Are they green? Do they manufacture land mines or chemical weapons? Her argument was that if the college’s investment committee was going to continue to select and monitor the plan’s investment options primarily on the basis of fund performance, then employees should be empowered with information to make morally prudent investment choices based on their own standards. Further, she thought that the college’s senior administrators and the board should also be provided with this information because they too were making investment decisions with the college’s funds through the plan’s matching contributions. The director thought that even this watered-down request was not administratively feasible; however, he was much more comfortable with this informational approach from a fiduciary perspective than he was with a special moral/ecological screening approach. He contemplated whether the professor’s reference to the bishop’s guidelines might illuminate a course of action using the virtues of prudence and justice to regulate all the competing concerns raised by institutional investment decisions. He ended the conversation by informing the professor that although he very much enjoyed their discussion and appreciated her insights, the plan’s investment choices were not HR’s responsibility and that she would have to take up this issue directly with the chair of the investment committee who happened to be a faculty member.

In the days following their conversation, the HR director decided to get an opinion from St. Anywhere’s Mission and Values vice president on this issue. Should the mutual fund investments available through the retirement plan be screened with regard to fundamental Catholic teachings? If not, is there a moral obligation on the part of Catholic institutions to help employees be informed investors when making individual retirement plan fund choices, such as issuing a human dignity and ecological report card for each of the funds’ top five stock holdings? The fundamental question the HR director now had was this: even if the investment committee meets its fiduciary responsibility by ensuring that only quality funds are available to its faculty and staff in its 403(b) retirement plan, is there a yet higher obligation for an institution that professes to be Catholic? Is there?
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As always, we invite our readers to enter into this dialogue by sharing their thoughts and experiences, as well as their practical and effective solutions, on any of the topics we address in our columns. To facilitate this, we have a blog - http://hr-forum-ccu.blogspot.com/ - where readers can comment on this column or any of our past columns. We encourage your feedback to begin our collective attention to these issues.

We would also like to post links to your mission statements as well as HR and compensation philosophy documents if you would like to share them with our readers. This will permit a fuller discussion of how mission and CST enters into the employment process. Please let us know if you would like us to link to any of your institution’s documents.

The opinions expressed in this column are ours alone and do not represent DePaul University’s.

February 25, 2010

Among the resources used for this column you may find additional information at the following cites:
Pope John Paul II’s commentary on investment as a moral issue was taken from Centesimus annus, paragraph 36 (1991):

http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_01051991_centesimus-annus_en.html (last visited on 2/24/10).
U.S. Catholic Conference of Catholic Bishops: Socially Responsible Investment Guidelines November 12, 2003, at http://www.usccb.org/finance/srig.shtml (last visited on 2/10/10).
Economic Justice For All, Pastoral Letter on Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S. Economy (1986) can be found at:
http://www.usccb.org/jphd/economiclife/pdf/economic_justice_for_all.pdf (last visited on 2/24/10).
A report on developing understandings of fiduciary duty was prepared by the Social Investment Forum in “Investment Consultants and Responsible Investing, Current Practice and Outlook in the United States,” December 2009, and can be found at
http://www.socialinvest.org/documents/Investment_consultant.pdf (last visited on 2/10/10).
The report on the 2009 Mutual Funds outperforming their benchmarks came from the Social Investment Forum’s Press Release: “Social Investment Forum: Two Thirds of Socially Responsible Mutual Funds Outperformed Benchmarks During 2009 Economic Downturn,” January 21, 2009, https://www.socialinvest.org/news/releases/presselease.cfm?id=151 (last visited on February 9, 2010).

For an additional resource on Mission and Socially Responsible Investing, see: Charles Strain, “In Service of Whom? The Impact of Vincentian Universities’ Institutional Investment Practices on Global Poverty,” Vincentian Heritage, Vol. 28, No. 2 (2008), p.167.