Van Engelshoven: 'Conversations should banish dubious contracts for PhD students'
PhD students are sometimes presented with employment contracts that are not allowed under the collective labor agreement. The solution, according to outgoing minister Ingrid van Engelshoven: everyone has to sit down together.
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PhD students at Dutch universities should be employed full-time for four years: that is agreed in the collective labor agreement. But often enough they have to work part-time, they get a year less time or they give a lot of education on the side.
Questionable contract
Every year, the Dutch PhD Candidates Network (PNN) puts it to the test by analyzing all vacancy texts for new PhD candidates. The latest Employment Conditions Monitor for 2019 stated that many vacancy texts were rather vague and that in at least 12 percent of the vacancies candidates were offered a "dubious contract".
Spurred on by the House of Representatives, the minister discussed it with the employers: the VSNU university association, the NWO science financier, the KNAW science society and the NFU hospital federation. Several political parties submitted a list of questions, which the minister now has answered.
More conversations
The common thread: more conversations to come. Everyone talks to everyone. For example, the VSNU holds 'periodic consultations' with the PNN to "improve the design of PhD candidate policy" and NWO, KNAW and NFU are happy to discuss "exceptions and points for improvement arising from the PNN monitor".
And then there is the minister himself. He will continue to discuss the much-criticized experiment with scholarship PhDs (who fall outside the collective labor agreement) with the PNN. She herself also talks about this with the University of Groningen, which has appointed most of these PhD students.
Checklist
Are those conversations going anywhere? “It is not going as fast as we would like,” says PNN chairman Rosanne Anholt. “The problems have not gone away: as PNN we are still regularly called by PhD students who wonder whether it is normal for them to have a contract of 0,8 FTE for three years.”
Nevertheless, steps are being taken. For example, the PNN has made a checklist that all human resource directors have received from the university association. “It describes exactly what a PhD vacancy must meet according to the PNN,” explains Anholt. “We then have to wait and see if and when something like this really trickles down to the departments.”
The employers have informed the minister that their human resource departments use the checklist for their vacancy texts, Van Engelshoven writes. Anholt hopes that PhD students will notice something.
Deadlines
Another step is for the institutions to work on career counseling for PhD students. The universities will also look into whether the number of teaching tasks can be limited. And they will talk about it with the PNN.
The PvdA can make things a little more concrete. The party wants to know if there are any deadlines on which something must be improved. PNN chairman Anholt sees something in that. “Then you can test whether something really changes.”
The next PNN monitor of employment conditions in vacancy texts will be published in September. It concerns the past year, so the influence of the checklist is probably not yet visible. “Maybe that will work next year,” says Anholt.
Also read: PhD students are burdened by a high workload
