According to this article on "The Part-Time Satisfaction Gap," a survey of adjunct faculty at community colleges revealed that contract-only instructors were more concerned with a lack of benefits--health insurance/care, retirement--than with their low pay. I know I would be more willing to stay in academia as a non-tenure-track faculty member if I were guaranteed a reasonable health care plan and some sense of saving for a future after employment. However, I'm not sure that many people would be content with $15,000 a year plus benefits unless they were supported by partners who had much greater income--those of us who depend on university employment for, well, survival can't really subsist on that amount alone for very long. This is why so many of us must maintain second (or even third) jobs, which sometimes detracts from certain teaching duties or independent research agendas (more for some than for others). And none of this still takes into account the idea of job security, an issue that has arisen in the workforce far beyond academia but is one of the supposed perks of tenure, for which adjuncts are not eligible.
Of course, there are also some funny lines in the article, like "[t]he bottom line is that part timers are less satisfied with their jobs than are their full-time counterparts." As in, "duh." Sorry, that was a particularly non-academic response. :)
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