By Ben Velderman
EAGnews.org

PITTSBURGH – President Ronald Reagan once famously said that the nine most terrifying words in the English language are, “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”

Hundreds of part-time employees at Pennsylvania’s Community College of Allegheny County (CCAC) are finding out exactly what he meant.

MORE NEWS: Know These Before Moving From Cyprus To The UK

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports that CCAC officials have informed 400 part-time employees – including 200 adjunct faculty members – that their hours will be cut from 30 per week to 25, beginning Dec. 31. The reductions are in direct response to President Obama’s new health care law, the Affordable Care Act.

Under the new law, employees who work 30 hours or more per week will be considered full-time and will be required to receive health insurance from their employer.

That would cost the college $6 million – money the institution simply does not have, said CCAC spokesman David Hoovler.

CCAC adjunct professor Adam Davis said the announcement was “kind of a double whammy” for him and his colleagues.

“ … We are facing a legal requirement [under the new law] to get health care, and if the college is reducing our hours, we don’t have the money to pay for it,” Davis told the news site.

The only people happy about the news are union organizers.

MORE NEWS: How to prepare for face-to-face classes

Jeff Cech, a United Steelworkers representative who is already trying to organize adjunct professors at another university, acknowledged that CCAC officials were acting within the bounds of the Affordable Care Act by cutting hours, but were violating “the spirit of the law.”

“If they are doing it at CCAC, it can’t be long before they do it other places,” Cech told the news site.

He’s right about that. Struggling academic institutions across the nation already employ too many part-time instructors because that’s all they can afford at the moment. Many more schools will drop the number of hours those employee work to avoid the added cost of health insurance.

And that, of course, will play right into the unions’ hands.

Thousands of frightened college employees who will want the “protection” of a labor union during the economic upheaval that’s being caused by the Affordable Care Act. They will organize and demand full-time status, higher wages and more expensive benefits than their employers can afford.

Unions have already wreaked havoc on K-12 education, and seem bent on doing the same at the college and university level. If the unions succeed in their organizing efforts, college officials will be forced to either lay off employees or pass the extra labor costs on to students – or maybe both.

Students will have to borrow more money to cover the increase, and will leave school with even more debt.

Remember the pledge President Obama made on the campaign trail during his bid for re-election: “I want to keep on going and make sure that two million more people can go to community colleges to get trained in the jobs that exist right now and lower college tuition costs.”

Those goals may be prove unattainable now that the president has succeeded in cementing his health insurance requirement as the law of the land.

Sounds like a government-created, union-enhanced nightmare scenario, any way you slice it.