Special education teacher gets no pay after paying for benefits,

GRtak

GRtak

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A Special Education Worker Talks About Empty Paychecks, Organizing

In a country where jobs are at a premium, having one in a public school that allows you to buy into a medical benefit package is a pretty good deal, right? Sure, if you overlook that paying for the benefits and taxes on the salary may leave you with a net of zero take home pay.

It?s an all-too-common story and it?s the one facing Kathy Meltsakos, a special education paraprofessional working in northeast Massachusetts, hard by the Atlantic. She lives on the same street she grew up on and has worked the schools she attended years ago, bringing a deep knowledge of the generations of people living in and around her town into that work.

Education support professionals like Meltsakos and the rest of America?s workers are doing their best to weather today?s economy. But consider the numbers.

Initially earning $13.74 for a 35-hour week with the Pentucket schools, Meltsakos paid 20 percent of her insurance, which was manageable, and she did that for 10 years until laid off in June 2010. While looking for work she received unemployment benefits. She was later rehired at a lower pay rate, with five less hours, and with a higher contribution for her healthcare.

?I was placed at the bottom of the scale at $10.74 an hour for a 30-hour week. After taxes, I paid 60 percent of my medical insurance. My pay stubs from February to June 24 (the end of the school year) show no net take home pay since February. Oh ? and the insurance rates went up in May.?

By April she was frustrated with no take home pay and knew she had to get a second job. ?My husband is doing everything he can but we have kids in college and of course the regular bills to pay. I tried a pizza shop, then found work with a discount store, twenty hours a week during school, and a few more now that school is out. They pay a little more per hour but no benefits.? For the summer she landed a job with special ed kids for 20 hours a week at $14 an hour.

?I?m not the only ESP worker in the position of working two or three jobs to try to make ends meet,? Meltsakos said. ?We are not looking for a free ride. But we have to question a system that forces workers in any profession to stitch together several pay streams to make ends meet. It can get debilitating. I check my life at the school door and am upbeat and positive because some days, I?m the only happy face those kids see. What is that worth to society??

Meltsakos is not shy discussing economic facts, having been a local Massachusetts Teacher Association leader for 11 years. She served on her local bargaining team three times and currently serves as an MTA board member representing ESPs and teachers at the state level. She is also a graduate of the 2011 NEA ESP Leaders for Tomorrow program.

These days she works with students in the lower grades. She has worked with high school age students with special needs and would go back to them if a position opened in her district.

?This work is my career,? she says with pride. ?I know what I?m doing and am good at what I do. Don?t get me wrong, I learn every day.? When asked about the economics of the job, she doesn?t beat around the bush. ?Yes. It should pay better. We have a ways to go on that score. A lot of educating and organizing and bargaining is going to have to get done before any fair salary changes happen.?

Meltsakos has come to the conclusion that she, and ESPs and other education employees, must talk more with neighbors, lawmakers and others about the economics of work and home, living wages and what public school workers do at work.

?My thinking is that we need to speak more about family, community and business priorities, the work that we do and its worth to society. I think our neighbors should know what we are getting paid to educate and care for their children. I think they should know just about every penny gets plowed back into the community in the form of taxes, house payments and rent, buying food and clothes and all the rest. Just like the rest of the community. I want to see all of us succeed.?

Warming to the subject on her mind, Meltsakos said, ?We?re taught from an early age not to talk a whole lot about earnings and comparing our salaries. It?s not ?polite?. Well, we?ve had about thirty years of being polite about work and paychecks and look where that has got us.?

Meltsakos admits, ?These are big issues. They can get complicated. But putting these kinds of conversations off and keeping our noses to the grindstone isn?t getting us out of this hole our state and our country finds itself in.?

?I think we have to start talking to a lot more people. Educating. Organizing. It won?t be easy, but it is better than doing the same thing over and over and getting the same result. Let?s start talking. Then we can make plans and take action.? (You can do just that by signing up to volunteer in the 2011 and 2012 campaigns for public education at EducationVotes.org.)

Meanwhile, Meltsakos will return to that job in September with a 55-cent an hour increase ? and an increase in the cost of her medical benefits.
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This is ridiculous.
 
?We are not looking for a free ride. But we have to question a system that forces workers in any profession to stitch together several pay streams to make ends meet. It can get debilitating."
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That's the truth. Employers can get away with anything right now and they're taking full advantage of it. Both my father and one of my uncles lost jobs they'd had for 13-15 years and are now getting payed half what they were earning just a few years ago. My uncle lost his house and my dad nearly lost his. And 3 years later there's still no one in the federal government willing to tackle the employment problem.
 
That is just...FUBAR. And even though I ended up pulling my son out of the public school system, he has special needs as well, there's no amount of money you could pay me to teach some of those kids. Most teachers earn those paychecks, and then some.

And when I say 'those kids', I mean the so called 'normal' kids. The ones who have no discipline at home, no manners, and think that the world revolves around them. The ones who aren't there to learn, but to see how much trouble they can cause, and know there's not a damn thing the teachers or the schools can do to them.
 
Welcome to health care reform! This is how health care works now in MA. It is also worth mentioning, if she choose to not have health care through her job she could not qualify for any lower cost health care and there is no middle line anymore. It is a loophole that makes it impossible for some people to afford any form of health care, it is rather disgusting like that.
 
That is why I am not a big fan of the healthcare plan that got passed. It is welfare for the insurance comapanies.
 
Wow, guess that's why you should never do a half arsed job of healthcare reform.. and maybe get some better employment laws?
 
GRtak said:
That is why I am not a big fan of the healthcare plan that got passed. It is welfare for the insurance comapanies.
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Ah, but this is Romneycare. It's been around for a while and is restricted to MA. It has caused healthcare and insurance costs in MA to skyrocket.

If you thought that was bad, wait until you see the implementation of some of the stuff that's lurking in the "you'll have to pass it before you can read it" Obamacare. It's like Romneycare, but *worse*. The gigantic insurance companies are laughing their arses off, the smaller ones are are going to be *screwed*, and they're basically going to defund Medicare (existing pensioners' healthcare) to try and pay for it. It gets worse from there.

WillDAQ said:
Wow, guess that's why you should never do a half arsed job of healthcare reform.. and maybe get some better employment laws?
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Starting out by passing real, meaningful tort and malpractice lawsuit reform would go a long way towards keeping costs down. Few places seem to want to do that, though.

Here's something from personal experience. As you know, my mom has been fighting cancer for several years now (and, yeah, it's suddenly looking not good) - she's had experience with medical providers in her home state of California and here in Texas.

A few years ago, Texas passed some tort reform and some pretty major medical malpractice reform. This cut way down on frivolous malpractice lawsuits and encouraged more medical personnel and institutions to relocate here. California, of course, continues to make it easier to sue for idiot reasons and then stacks more bureaucratic reporting requirements on their doctors. I understand that they're circulating a multiple-page diversity questionnaire out there that doctors must return to 'ensure that they are treating a properly diverse patient population' or some such nonsense this year.

At a practical level, it means this - when she needs various scans, she has a choice of an imaging center in California or the competing center in Houston, Texas. It is actually cheaper for both her and her insurance company to:

Get on a plane.
Fly to Houston.
Rent a car.
Stay overnight in a hotel room.
Drive to the center.
Get scanned.
Leave. Get lunch.
Return car.
Fly home.

Than it does for her to drive across town (in California) and get scanned there. No joke, she showed me the figures once. It's literally cheaper for her to fly halfway across the damn continent to get her scans than it is to get it locally. There is no loss in quality by going with the 'cheaper' course of action, either - the Houston center is M.D. Anderson, the pre-eminent cancer center in the US if not the world. Her local facility... not so much. I've heard M.D. Anderson docs complain about the low quality of imaging that her local facility sends to them.
 
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Cold Fussion said:
It was bad enough we had to read your Texas is better California story once with your mother as the emotional side story, it isn't needed twice.
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It actually is, to illustrate the disparity in costs.

Other states have tried to pass similar reforms (and Texas was not the first to actually get it passed, I just can't recall who was off the top of my head). The point here is not "Texas is better" but "Tort and malpractice reform is demonstrably more effective at bringing down healthcare costs than so-called 'healthcare reform' as implemented to date in the US."

But the ambulance chasers and lawsuit lotto artists don't like it, so it's hard to get them passed. They might actually have to, you know, WORK then.
 
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Spectre said:
It is actually cheaper for both her and her insurance company to:

Get on a plane.
Fly to Houston.
Rent a car.
Stay overnight in a hotel room.
Drive to the center.
Get scanned.
Leave. Get lunch.
Return car.
Fly home.

Than it does for her to drive across town (in California) and get scanned there. No joke, she showed me the figures once. It's literally cheaper for her to fly halfway across the damn continent to get her scans than it is to get it locally.
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That's inadvertently a very good demonstration of the difference in the UK: Cost would be zero in either. The only reason to move to a more distant hospital would be for particular specialties and even then it would be 100 miles tops.
 
The health care here is for two kinds of people, those with no jobs and those with high paying ones. If you are dead broke like me you qualify for free or very cheap health care, but you need to have the sort of income that barely pays for anything and are constantly trying to decide if having heat in the winter is a good idea etc. (It is also illegal now to not have health care due to the reform, you are fined if you don't). If you are middle class then you don't qualify for the low income kind and you can't afford the private companies because the prices are too high. I am actually scared of getting any sort of real job because of this.
 
WillDAQ said:
That's inadvertently a very good demonstration of the difference in the UK: Cost would be zero in either. The only reason to move to a more distant hospital would be for particular specialties and even then it would be 100 miles tops.
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Already paid for =/= zero.
 
Spectre said:
Starting out by passing real, meaningful tort and malpractice lawsuit reform would go a long way towards keeping costs down. Few places seem to want to do that, though.
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Because that's what the Republicans wanted.
 
It's called National Insurance for a reason - every one employed pays, no matter what their age, sex or health record it is a fixed amount of ones earnings (about 10%) but that also pays for sick pay and unemployment pay - well in theory - Govts have messed the system up since the 1960s starting with Wilson and his Earnings Related Pay when we went to a percentage tax against income and an earnings related benefit, before that it was a fixed amount for premium and benefit, then Mrs Thatcher (I think) took away the Earnings supplement and made it a flat benefit but kept the percentage tax base (Premium amount).

Still, in our system which I will agree is not perfect, if you are sick you get a Doctor and a Hospital bed immediately if needed, or put on a waiting list if not urgent but it is not too long a wait now.

None of the above non-sense that Americans put up with - well until Cameroooon gets his way, when he will totally muck it up. (Lobbyists - you got to love 'em).

It is a bit like the Road Fund Licence not all that revenue gets spent on roads - surprise, surprise.
 
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Cobol74 said:
It is a bit like the Road Fund Licence not all that revenue gets spent on roads - surprise, surprise.
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Sorta like how Social Security was actually making a profit before politicians decided to dip their greedy fingers into it for their own pet projects.
 
So... the amount you need to pay for health insurance does not depend on how much you earn?
 
Whoa, that's terrible. People in the middle-ground are so screwed. Is this Medicare compulsary?
 
The problem is that it is not medicare, it is mandatory private insurance from a company.
 
narf said:
So... the amount you need to pay for health insurance does not depend on how much you earn?
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It does if you are poor enough. If that woman didn't have health benefits in her job she could probably get affordable insurance, but there is another loophole, if you job or school provides insurance you are ineligible for the state plans. I for example am eligible for the free state plan, but only because I had to drop out of school. When I was in school it was mandatory I paid for the school insurance plan or I would have been fined for a much larger sum of money. The school insurance was thankfully not horribly expensive but considering I qualify for the free insurance it was more than I will be paying now.
Now if you make enough money not to qualify as poor enough for the state insurance, you have to pay whatever the private company wants or you will be fined. When that happens the insurance has nothing to do with income and everything to do with how hard they can fuck you in the ass. It is in my best interest to stay broke because I need the health care.

zephyrus17 said:
Whoa, that's terrible. People in the middle-ground are so screwed. Is this Medicare compulsary?
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Insurance is. You can have whatever is available but you have to have something or you are fined. The state insurance you end up on when you cannot afford the private you end up on some division of Masshealth.
 
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