Termination

Fixed-term contracts and the resulting permanent uncertainty characterize the everyday working lives of most employees in the scientific and technical-administrative sectors: the constant worry about career prospects produces anxiety, stress, unpaid overtime and competition. In short: it makes people ill.

Officially, the University of Kassel has 3,306 employees in 2021. Of these, only just under 10 percent are regular professors, most of whom work in full-time civil servant positions. The majority of university staff (approx. 90%) are academic and administrative/technical staff, who are often employed on part-time and fixed-term contracts to keep the university running. The contracts of academic colleagues range from a few months to 3-4 years. Student assistants do not appear in the statistics at all because they are considered material resources and not staff and are only employed on a fixed-term basis (see integration).

The system of fixed-term contracts is not only unfair, but also highly inefficient. Constant changes in the staff structure mean that knowledge and experience gained by former employees is lost and reliable support and contact for students can often not be guaranteed. Fixed-term contracts also prevent high-quality research and teaching, for example by hindering reliable cooperation or limiting the development of knowledge and capacities within the workforce. Fixed-term contracts eat up working time, as they force colleagues to write often hopeless research proposals instead of actually conducting active research. In addition, it is contrary to the ideal of a democratic university because a large proportion of employees are dependent on the small group of professors due to fixed-term contracts and can therefore be blackmailed, are hardly represented on committees or do not have the time to work on committees due to the duration of their contract.

A consistent removal of fixed-term contracts means permanent positions for permanent tasks. Those who keep the university running should be appropriately recognized for their work - this includes both reliable employment prospects and realistic job descriptions (see also Discharge).

It is important that employees who take on permanent tasks work together to advocate for all positions to be made permanent so that the university management has to change its position. In the 4E campaign, we are working together withUni Kassel unlimitedfor a move away from the misuse of fixed-term contracts at our university.