I’m working at a Swiss university institution and… At the moment there’s some “discussion” about my contract and about the contract of my colleagues in the same position. The employer insists in forcing a contract which can only practically go to maybe 60% or 75% - because that would be already more than a human being can manage. 100% is pure nonsense: nobody can manage that amount of work.
I’d be interested in your thoughts about this, and especially about the following questions: what are the situations in life where somebody can be obliged to full time work? I’m wondering if somebody might ever be obliged to take a 100% contract “whatever it means”, for example as a consequence of the judge’s decisions after a divorce. If there are such cases, then our employer’s strategy has to be denounced even more strongly.
Many thanks for your thoughts and suggestions! Have a great day!
For example, my contract might define a working day as 8.5 hours. So 100% would be 42.5 hours per week.
Beware talk of paying you only at 60% but expecting that you still work 100% hours. I suspect if you confirm working hours in a day that the percentage would be based off and talk about compensation for overtime hours, there might be some back-tracking.
A few universities are notorious for paying you only 60% but actually having your work way over 100% hours.
What do you mean by this?
As in “next to your studies” or what?
I think you missed to share a bit more context.
80-100% is “standard load” for a “full time” employee in most places.
Working at an university (ETH), I can tell you that the discussion is somewhat, eh, academic.
In the past, our PhD students all had a 60% contract, but were supposed to work 100%. The arguments were that students spend time studying. Regardless, for good reasons this was deemed to be against modern labour law. So a while back, HR changed all contracts to 100%. Salaries remained the same – just getting less paid per hour.
(Current PhD salaries 53500 CHF for standard 1st year PhD students).
It’s the person’s choice to sign a 100% working contract. For me ‘obliged’ only applies to the personal situation. If you need to pay bills, there is a necessity to earn money. If only a 100% contract allows you to pay all the bills, that’s still a personal situation which obliges you.
As mentioned by @PhilMongoose , of course the definition of 100%, measured in hours, is important to clarify. Basically, you cannot be obliged to work more than the agreed hours. Of course, overtime and the definition of overtime are topics of discussion, disputes and court cases.
This. I got paid 60% at EPFL, but you could get paid 80-100% if you took on additional responsibilities like IT support. The problem is everyone one the same 60-70 hours regardless of formal pay.
If I recall correctly, in US PhD students are supposed to work only 20 “qualified” work hours per week, as mentioned in labor law and visa stipulations.
Reality is that they probably work 20 “unqualified” hours in 1.5-2 days, with a work week consisting of 7 days.
Thank you for all the answers and sorry if my original message was missing some context. @Fliss got it right… It’s that sort of academic situation, even if not for PhD - for normal teaching contracts of the “less prestigious type”.
Let’s say every hour of presence with the students implies on average another hour of preparation, planning, coordinating with colleagues and so on. With a working week of 42 hours, the maximum you can be with the students is 21 hours: the rest of the time you’re working preparing the lessons, revising the work of the students, planning etc.
Now the university says: “a 100% position means 30 hours of direct teaching with the students”. They even tell you: “we know, nobody can do your job at 100%, it’s just impossible”. So what you do is… You take maximum a 70% position. But you’re actually working 100%.
Being in this sort of situation, I was wondering: what if there is a possible catastrophe in life which might force me not just to earn a certain amount, but more specifically to demonstrate that I’m working full time. I’d have a big problem, because a full time contract, with “100%” written on it, is made impossible by my employer.
But it’s good news if nobody can think of a catastrophic situation with this specific sort of consequence!
Unless you are a farmer or you are responsible for a cost center and have full power to decide whether to recruit people or how to spend the budget - no matter whats written in your employment contract, they can not make you work more than 45 hours at a full time quota.
If You work more than that, you log the numera and then just let them know this number. Then, you can at any time (now / when you exit) request additional overtime compensation for the additional hours you worked - or you can just refuse to work more. It doesnt matter what was written in your contract or if it mentioned anything like that your overtime was considered part of the deal.
If you work 70%, that max number of hours is reduced accortingly to 31.5 hours a week.
They’re likely not asking you to or allowing you to do overtime though. From their point of view there’s a fixed ratio of hours worked vs hours in front of student, and if you need more you’re probably underperforming. (Whether that ratio is correct is another debate)
Not sure what the big deal is. If 100% is 30 hours of student time, then that is doable. Even with 100% overhead, that is 60 hours per week, again doable and hopefully you can be more efficient than that.
My advice is to fully focus on your current situation and make the best out of it. Talk to your colleagues and university representatives about it to get a wider picture.
Once you graduate and if you leave academia, the world will be different. Also tough, but different.
I think they’re not a student. As far as I start to understand, he works and earn full time equivalent, but their actual contract only states actual hours spent teaching, not preparing and the extra hours achieved, thus it is a part-time contract despite working full time and have the corresponding wage.
They’re asking if this glitch can have further consequences but aesthetics, especially outside of the job itself.
It’s exactly as @JEPG described - thank you for putting it into words much better than I could. Nobody involved is a student, everybody has over 10 years of professional experience in this specific teaching and research field. It feels a bit like “Lohndumping”, since the salary is correctly defined according to our qualification and according to the high level of specialisation required. So when working “100% time” (or more, with tons of flexibility required) you’re getting “70% salary”, which is not right.
But my main question was exactly about the possible further consequences outside of the job itself!
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