Integration

There are numerous colleagues at our university who do essential work for the functioning of the university, but who are not employed by the university and are therefore often not covered by collective bargaining agreements. These include colleagues from the building cleaning service, the security and locking service and student assistants.

Student assistants have organized themselves in recent years with the support of GEW and ver.di and are demanding to finally be included in the collective agreement in order to be able to fight for their right to better pay and better working hours. Student assistants are central to research and teaching at the University of Kassel. They carry out tasks such as tutorials, the administration of Moodle courses, support corrections, prepare research data and support a variety of administrative tasks. With 2000 colleagues, they make up a significant proportion of employees at the University of Kassel - even if they are not officially counted as staff. Despite their important function, assistants are considered material resources in the university's budget logic. This means that they have no representation under labor law and therefore no opportunity to help shape their own working conditions.

Student assistants must finally be hired as regular staff at the University of Kassel so that they are part of collective bargaining and can be classified transparently.

This also applies to colleagues from the outsourced areas of cleaning and from the security and locking service. The cleaning staff clean the lecture halls, seminar rooms and much more. Many colleagues have been working at the University of Kassel sites for decades. However, due to the outsourcing of their work, they have to register as unemployed again with every new job advertisement and hope to be taken on. What's more, they often only receive contracts for 6-18 months from the companies commissioned, although the tender is for 3-4 years. For the colleagues, this means a largely lawless life during the probationary period. They have no legal representation either at the university or in the cleaning companies, which are mainly characterized by cheap offers, but not by seriousness or quality. There are no vacation or sick leave replacements and the number of areas to be cleaned is constantly increasing.

We are one workforce, the same rights must apply to all of us! This also applies to colleagues from outsourced areas such as caretaking and building cleaning!