A report points to a surge in the number of part-time teachers at universities

Their number has jumped 30% in seven years, notes the Our Public Services collective in a note published Thursday. He denounces a misused status used to compensate for the lack of holders.

The number of temporary workers is exploding at university. This is the observation of the collective Our public services, which published a note on Thursday April 11. According to this study, the number of these precarious staff in faculties has increased by 30% in seven years. They now represent more than half of the teachers.

This phenomenon has multiple consequences, firstly on the working conditions of the people concerned. They are often young researchers, who are waiting for their tenure, but as there are very few positions, this period of precariousness is lengthening. Originally, the session was designed to bring in, on an ad hoc basis, professionals from the business world, but this status is today misused, points out the collective, and is used to provide daily class hours, to compensate for the lack of incumbents.

“The vacancies have become the default type of employment used by university administrations.”

The collective Our public services

in their note

These temporary workers are very often paid several months late. The monthly payment of their salary, officially compulsory since 2020, is impossible by administrations because their working time is not fixed in advance. Their remuneration is therefore recorded once the hours have actually been completed.

But this very broad use of temporary workers also raises legal questions. This widespread use “places public power on the margins of legality”, affirms this report, because it contradicts the texts which govern this status. Furthermore, these precarious agents are not covered by the Labor Code or the Civil Service Code. They are sometimes even recruited illegally, when they have no other main job, which is nevertheless obligatory in this status. This is also the case when universities ask temporary workers to declare themselves self-employed to circumvent this obligation.

Part-time workers cost five times less

A large part of the problem is that this situation is the subject of a form of denial, analyzes Hugo Moneron, editor of this note. “The temporary workers are the great invisibles. The category which, in reality, crushes all other categories in terms of number, but which disappears in the official statistics, he observes. When you read the social reports of the ministry, on each table with figures, a small asterisk explains that temporary workers are not taken into account in these statistics, as if it were a detail that can be put at the bottom of the page, whereas this is the majority category. So we let this situation proliferate and we act as if it didn’t exist.”

This generalization of the employment of temporary workers comes from the very difficult financial situation of universities. There have been more and more students since the 1960s, but budgets have not increased in the same proportions. The advantage of employing temporary workers is that they cost much less than permanent staff. Five times less, on average.