Working over 19.5 hours

The policy, per the Library Student Handbook:

"Student employees may be scheduled to work up to a maximum of 49% of the working hours in the month (19½ hours per week)... Exceptions to normal work shifts may be requested and approved by the supervisor when it is essential to the operation of the Library."

But why is there a campus maximum of 19.5 hours per week?

As some background information, there's some job-status changes that start to kick in when students work more than half-time (20 hours/week) regularly.

The thing that students don't like is that UC will start taking out some money to put into a retirement account for you. My understanding is that 1.45% of your gross earnings would go to Medicare and 7.5% of your gross earnings would go to the Defined Contribution Plan (DCP), a tax-deferred University retirement program. You would be able to get the DCP money out again, but only after your employment has ended, and there may be penalties for withdrawing before retirement.


From the university/library perspective, it is undesirable for students to go over the half time status because sick and vacation time will start to accrue after a certain number of weeks of working over 19.5 hours. This is not a usual benefit for work study positions.

For more information on the Defined Contribution Plan, please review the Library Student Handbook.

I except to approve more of you to work over 19.5 hours in the upcoming weeks while many of our staff leave campus. This blog post is meant to give you full disclosure that you may have retirement contributions automatically deducted from your paycheck if you do choose to work over 19.5 hours regularly.

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