On a sunny afternoon on April 14, a group of about 100 junior lecturers, students, and others gathered at the Roeterseiland Campus to present a petition to the Executive Board (CvB) of the University of Amsterdam (UvA). ASVA was also present in solidarity. The petition, which garnered over 2,000 signatures in just a few weeks, demands the immediate transition from temporary to permanent contracts for junior lecturers—a demand that CasualUvA has been making for years.
CasualUvA is a collective of UvA employees that has been fighting for their labour rights for years. The collective consists mainly of junior lecturers (D4s) who, despite the structural nature of their work, are offered only temporary contracts with no prospect of a permanent contract. This struggle has not been without victories; a few years ago, through a series of strikes, they succeeded in extending their one-year temporary contracts to four years.
The junior lecturers, however, remain determined in their fight. After drafting a petition with their demands earlier this year and mobilizing both students and faculty on a large scale to sign it, the time came on April 14 to present it to the Executive Board. Around 4:00 p.m., the demonstration began on the lawn next to Building L on the Roeterseiland Campus, and Sam Hamer’s speech kicked things off.
In his speech, Sam emphasized his personal experiences and the uncertainties that come with having to work under a temporary contract. As a junior lecturer in the sociology department and organizer at CasualUvA, he was able to speak both about the negative effects of temporary contracts on his own health and teaching career, and about the power and necessity of organizing in the workplace. His speech was therefore not a lament about the precarious conditions under which junior lecturers live, but rather showcased the passion, fighting spirit, and anger of the group of lecturers on whose behalf he spoke. He took aim at the hypocrisy of the UvA, which exploits precisely this passion and love for the university to keep junior lecturers on a precarious leash. The UvA simply cannot function without the structural work of junior lecturers, and it is therefore high time they receive the minimum to which they are entitled: a permanent contract.
After Sam, Sahand Mozdbar, chairman of the ASVA Student Union, took the floor. In his speech, he emphasized the solidarity and shared interests between students and lecturers, but also the negative effects that temporary contracts have on students. He underscored that temporary contracts prevent students from building lasting relationships with their lecturers, that grading takes longer, and that the quality of teaching suffers as a result. He concluded his speech with a call to students to organize themselves through the student union and by emphasizing that, in times of large-scale social breakdown, organization is the only way for students to stand up for their rights.
The final speaker, Nik Goedemans, focused primarily on the solidarity between faculty members with permanent contracts and those with temporary contracts.
In his speech, he clearly outlined the effects of temporary contracts on the functioning of his department and the positive effects of extending contracts from one to four years. According to Nik, a great deal of experience and expertise was lost time and again when contracts were not renewed, and the quality of education improved significantly when junior faculty members were able to stay longer following the victory of the faculty policy. Nevertheless, he emphasized that an incredible amount of knowledge is still being lost when junior lecturers are repeatedly forced to resign, and he expressed his solidarity with the junior lecturers’ just struggle to secure permanent contracts. Finally, he took the time to debunk the primary argument put forward by the UvA administration for not offering permanent contracts to junior lecturers: the concern that they would remain working as junior lecturers “forever”! He clearly demonstrated how nonsensical this argument is; the salary for junior lecturers is low, the working conditions aren’t great, and even if someone enjoys teaching so much that they want to contribute their expertise to the UvA for 40 years, they’d have to be jumping for joy… Things that seem obvious, but are apparently very difficult for the UvA board to grasp…
After three impassioned speeches, the moment had finally arrived to hand over the petition to Rector Magnificus Peter-Paul Verbeek. Antoine Germain, an organizer at CasualUvA, first read the petition’s demands aloud and then handed the petition to Peter-Paul. He accepted it and promised to take it “seriously,” but did not appreciate the demand to provide a response within three weeks. To what extent he and the rest of the Executive Board will heed the junior lecturers’ demands remains to be seen. However, what will further increase the pressure is that the FNV, during the new collective bargaining negotiations currently underway, is also demanding permanent contracts—something the FNV is doing in part because the junior lecturers have been advocating for this for so long.
This struggle, which has been waged by junior lecturers for years and is now being voiced within the CasualUvA collective, will most likely bear even more fruit in the near future. However, the struggle is far from over; lecturers still face an absurdly high workload, relatively low pay, and an extremely competitive job market. With the intensification of the Jetten-1 cabinet’s austerity policies, the need for organization will be more urgent than ever before. Only by seeking cooperation between lecturers and students can we form a united front against the destruction of our social rights. Students support teachers!