Monitoring of standard employment contracts

Your employment contract forms the basic framework of the legal relationship between you as an academic faculty member and WU. Every year, numerous employment contracts are concluded or amended at WU.

The form of these contracts varies greatly: There are, for example

• contracts for the different stages of an academic career (e.g. “prae-doc” and “post-doc” contracts)

• for different functions (e.g. research and teaching, or teaching only)

• fixed-term and open-ended contracts

• contracts for third-party funded positions

• full-time and part-time contracts

These contracts contain different clauses: some can be found in many contracts (e.g. the granting of exploitation rights in favor of WU), others concern only a snall number (e.g. the qualification agreement).

Our task is to continuously monitor and analyze these contracts and clauses.

Our focus is on:

• Are clauses uclearly phrased? How are they to be interpreted? Do they comply with the legal requirements and the Collective Bargaining Agreement for university staff?

• Have clauses (contractual provisions) changed over time to the disadvantage of employees? Are individual groups of workers treated differently without justification?

• Is there a need for negotiation, i.e. should the Academic Staff Council negotiate with the responsible office of the Vice-Rector for Human Resources about an unfavorable clause with the aim of changing it?

This is important as individual faculty members or applicants are in a disadvantageous bargaining position when signing a contract. In addition, the contracts are generally standardized, meaning it is often difficult to get the HR department to agree on an individual wording.

We pay attention to the formulation of the employment contracts and check the legal conformity of the clauses. To do this, we are provided with the standard employment contracts by the HR department. Although the Academic Staff Council usually cannot force a change, we represent all faculty members and thus can negotiate changes to unfavorable clauses in employment contracts.

If you have any questions about your contract, please do not hesitate to contact us! It is your comments and questions that help us to gain a fuller picture and learn where the problems really are!

Your contact persons:

Karin Burger-Ehrnhofer, Daniela Kremslehner

Monitoring of staffing level reports and salaries

We regularly check staffing level reports as well as employee’s salaries to ensure correct contract classifications and compliance with WU’s regulations, the Collective Bargaining Agreement for University Staff, and legal requirements.

Your contact persons:

Faculty status lists and general salary monitoring:

Karin Burger-Ehrnhofer und Margit Paul

Salary monitoring for professors:

Rony Flatscher und Sebastian Mock

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