Italian postdoc reforms ‘could eliminate 5,000 jobs’

An Italian law ending no-frills postdoctoral positions will lessen early career precarity, but political instability has thrown doubt on the extra funding needed for replacement roles. 

The government of Mario Draghi changed postdoc employment rules in June, as part of reforms linked to EU pandemic recovery funding, worth €191.5 billion (£161.5bn) to Italy. 

The changes replace old postdoc agreements with more formal employment contracts that include defined salaries and last at least two years. 

Riccardo Biondi, a principal investigator at the University of Padua, was once employed through the old agreements but now hires postdocs himself.

“It was definitely easier before,” he told Times Higher Education. “They were cheaper for the institutes,” he added, explaining that employers did not have to pay social security contributions. 

While postdocs had no defined teaching duties or upper limit on pay, they typically had to reapply annually and had no guarantee of long-term employment, he said. 

Francesco Sinopoli, secretary general of the Federation of Knowledge Workers, a trade union, said the old agreements were a “surreptitious type of exploitation”, offering poor pay and no entitlement to maternity or sick leave. 

Both agreed the changes would stabilise early careers, but they warned that new tax liabilities and a rule pegging spending on the better-paid contracts to the costs of the old agreements would effectively cut the number of positions nationally. 

“Either there is more money, or this is going to dramatically cut the number of people,” said Andrea Graziosi, a professor at the University of Naples Federico II and former president of the National Authority for the Evaluation of Universities and Research. 

He said a third of the roughly 15,000 postdocs on the old agreements could not be employed unless more funding was set aside. “Good intentions, as very often happens, produce very bad results,” he said.

University heads and policy experts in Berlin, Spain and the Netherlands have raised similar concerns that unfunded attempts to fix precarious working conditions would lead to the loss of positions.

Dr Biondi said a research project he submitted before the changes would now be impossible to run, as it only budgeted €25-30,000 per postdoc, as opposed to the roughly €80,000 needed to cover the new two-year contracts.  

Additional funding for the more generous contracts may have come in Italy’s annual funding bill, but the collapse of Mr Draghi’s government in July means that legislation will be delayed, he said, as it could take “months” to form a new government. 

The lower rungs of Italy’s research system have been thrown into limbo, just as reforms were beginning to make amends for a decade of austerity. 

Lorenzo Zamponi, an assistant professor of sociology at Scuola Normale Superiore, said the number of university professors had fallen by 20 per cent since 2011, while the number of postdocs hired on the cheap agreements had “exploded”. 

He said annual recruitment drives for tenure-track researchers had returned some stability and sustainability, but that two or three more rounds would be needed to get Italy’s research system to its pre-austerity strength. 

The far-right Brothers of Italy (FDL) currently leads polls ahead of September’s election. Professor Zamponi said many academics were concerned about potential cuts, as previous governments that included FDL’s progenitor party had doled out “the largest budget cuts to universities in Italian history”.

ben.upton@timeshighereducation.com