Percentage of paid parental leave plused
All working parents will receive (partially) paid parental leave from 2 August 2022. The cabinet recently announced that parents will continue to be paid 70 percent of their salary for nine weeks from that date if they take leave to care for their child. What does this mean for educational staff? AOb-lawyer Jacqueline van de Ruit explains.
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The new rules regarding parental leave mean that employees receive a salary during the nine weeks of leave that they can take in the first year of their child's life. Part-timers get it pro rata. In this way, the cabinet wants to achieve that parents are given more space to see how they will combine care and work. At the beginning of March, Karien van Gennip of Social Affairs announced that the percentage will increase even more. Initially this would be 50 percent of the daily wage, which is now being increased to 70 percent. "This also helps young fathers to be more involved in their child's growing up," so she said.
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Education collective agreements
“Most collective labor agreements already provide for educational staff that they are entitled to more than nine weeks of paid parental leave,” says AOb-lawyer Van de Ruit. “Employees in primary, secondary and secondary vocational education are paid 55 percent of their daily wage during their leave. A percentage of 62,5% applies to university employees. Education staff from these sectors also do not necessarily have to take the leave in the first year of their child's life.” Do you work at a college? Van de Ruit: “There, each educational institution has its own rules for taking parental leave. Ask your college about it.”
Better appointments
All employers in the Netherlands must comply with the new law. “It is a mandatory right,” says Van de Ruit. “The collective labor agreements may deviate from this, but not to the detriment of the employees. Only better agreements can be made. The new law is therefore what education staff receive at a minimum.”
Van de Ruit knows that this subject will certainly be included in the current collective labor agreement negotiations. “For example, we are trying to get the percentage of the daily wage even higher than 70 percent and, for example, to make broader agreements about the period that you can use the paid leave. Since many education employers already had better arrangements before the law, I think that additional agreements will certainly be made.”
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