North Rhine-Westphalia calls for better HE job terms

By Michael Gardner. The Social Democrat-Green government of North Rhine-Westphalia is tabling a bill in Germany’s Upper House, the Bundesrat, urging the federal government to improve employment terms in higher education and research.
“Our Bundesrat initiative is aimed at putting more pressure on the German federal government to do away with shortcomings in current legislation concerning fixed-term contracts in higher education and research,” explained the state’s Higher Education and Research Minister Svenja Schulze of the Social Democrats.
“There has to be an appropriate, fair and flexible balance between interests within the higher education and research system. Its employees deserve good employment terms and working conditions.”
In 2008, the analysis and statistics agency Hochschul-Informations-System GmbH, or HIS, was commissioned by the federal government to evaluate a new law (on fixed-term contracts) that had come into force a year earlier. Read more...