Timeline for My department asks to pay back to them the compensation I have received for being a member in a grant proposal assessment committee
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
9 events
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| May 20, 2023 at 18:20 | comment | added | Theo | @PsySp As an employer, they don't owe you extra hours they haven't formally asked you to perform. Your contract must be clear about this. If you, in the other hand, volunteered to give your employer roughly 50% more in number of hours from your time, remember that it's a personal choice. For you, it is extra labour that is providing some experience at best, detrimental to your life balance at worse. As for your employer, the truth is, most likely, they don't even care. | |
| May 20, 2023 at 11:47 | comment | added | Maarten Buis | Whenever you make a statement like that, you need to consider what you are going to do if the department head calls your bluff. Is the department head really going to notice if you don't spent the extra time on finishing paper xyz? Probably only when it is time to decide whether to continue to employ you... | |
| May 20, 2023 at 9:50 | comment | added | Ilmari Karonen | …of course they should've arranged that in advance, but presumably there's still something that may be arranged, if the university is willing to be flexible. And if they're not willing to be flexible, then the OP may wish to politely hint that they don't need to be as flexible regarding their working hours as they've apparently been in the past, either. | |
| May 20, 2023 at 9:46 | comment | added | Ilmari Karonen | @MaartenBuis: Agreed. However, the OP is also working a lot of unpaid overtime, which they're neither expected nor allowed to do under the collective agreement. However, they are (article 5.6, paragraph 3) allowed to agree with their employer to work extra hours on some days in exchange for time off on other days. So they could propose just that: take the days off and work extra hours (which they would do anyway) on other days to make up for it. | |
| May 20, 2023 at 9:38 | comment | added | Maarten Buis | Work to rule can be powerful if done as a collective action. But it is still costly: everybodies publication record suffers, and they are competing on an international market even if they choose to stay in the Netherlands. If you want to go that route your best bet is probably to organize that through the unions. | |
| May 20, 2023 at 9:34 | comment | added | Maarten Buis | @IlmariKaronen Knowing the Dutch system PsySp is probably on a temporary contract. What are the chances of getting that contract extended after such an action? After you worked like that for a while what will your publication record look like? So that leverage is pretty limited. If I were a department head in such a conversation I would strongly recommend you against such actions because I don't want you to hurt yourself, but if you insist I would not care one way or another. So that is how much leverage you have. | |
| May 20, 2023 at 9:20 | comment | added | Ilmari Karonen | @PsySp: …and you might have leverage there; Google "work to rule". Maybe you could apologize for misunderstanding the amount of flexibility allowed and expected in your employment with the university, and say that in the future you will work on tracking your time more accurately to ensure that you'll neither spend any paid work time on personal activities (like this grant committee) nor accidentally work more than your agreed upon hours per week. Having a lawyer or a union rep with you might be a good idea — they'll know both what to say and how to say it without sounding whiny or petulant. | |
| May 20, 2023 at 8:15 | comment | added | PsySp | That would actually be perfectly reasonable if I was working only these hours my employer is paying me. But more often than not, I work easily work 60h/w without getting payed back the extra time and effort I put. So, according to them, they do not own me a dime for any extra hour of work I put for them, but I own them all the compensation I get for working in a grant panel. | |
| May 19, 2023 at 19:18 | history | answered | Especially Lime | CC BY-SA 4.0 |