Westminster University is setting a new standard in the treatment of part-time staff with its plans to shift up to 250 academics from short-term contracts to permanent positions.
Jill Jones, the Westminster representative of lecturers' union Natfhe and a national negotiator, said that as part of the national framework talks, the university had approached 1,100 part-time staff to ask whether they were interested in fractional - that is, permanent part-time - contracts.
Traditionally, part-time staff are placed on short-term contracts. Such contracts, which typically are valid for just a semester, leave the employee with no holiday pay, no job security and no employment rights.
Ms Jones said that Westminster estimates that it has about 700 staff on hourly short-term contracts; of those, 250 have said they would like to become permanent.
A deal is expected to be struck in the next month in tandem with agreements on other issues in the national framework talks, such as ensuring that progression arrangements are identical for all academic staff.
Ms Jones said: "Nothing is agreed until everything is agreed."
A university representative confirmed that Westminster planned to offer fractional contracts to some staff.
"Westminster is looking at the position of its 700 visiting lecturers under ongoing framework agreement negotiations. Our intention is to offer a number of fractional posts as a result of this, but no final decisions have yet been reached," the representative said.
While London universities traditionally use more hourly paid staff because the employment pool is bigger in the capital, Natfhe has been pressuring universities for years to cut their reliance on such contracts.
According to Natfhe, 40 per cent of academic staff are on temporary contracts, which means they are paid by the hour, with some on zero-hours agreements that do not necessarily specify any hours.
Progress is slowly being made across the sector as employers gradually accept the justification for moving to fractional contracts, but contracts will not change wholesale until July 2006.
Staff appointed before 2002, when the fixed-term regulations were introduced, will be transferred automatically to permanent contracts.
A report commissioned by Natfhe shows that staff employed on short-term hourly paid contracts often have less job satisfaction, a sense of disempowerment and a lack of commitment to the institution.