Spain’s ‘crazy’ squeeze on precarity ‘impossible’ without funding

Spain has unveiled plans to cut the proportion of academics that can be employed on temporary contracts even further, but critics have warned that a lack of funding makes reforms “impossible”. 

While a redraft of the country’s universities law was already set to cut the proportion of teaching and research staff who could be employed on temporary contracts from 40 per cent to 20 per cent, the staff of universities minister Joan Subirats have now told local media that the limit would be lowered to 8 per cent.

“I was very surprised with this latest change because even 20 per cent was very aggressive,” Maria del Carmen Pérez Esparrells, a professor at the Autonomous University of Madrid who studies higher education funding, told Times Higher Education. “Eight per cent is crazy – it’s like a revolution in terms of temporary contracts for academic staff.” 

Spain’s dependence on temporary staffing can be traced back to the early 2010s, when the centre-right government of Mariano Rajoy sought to cut personnel costs by not replacing departing professors, Professor Pérez Esparrells said. 

Teaching gaps were filled with “associate lecturers”, a position intended for non-academic experts and that typically involves teaching up to six hours a week, at a cost to a university of about €12,000 (£10,245) annually. 

Professor Pérez Esparrells said that promoting the proposed share of associates to permanent positions would increase the national academic payroll by about 5 per cent, a cost borne by universities, which get most of their budgets from regional governments. “It’s impossible at the moment; the university governments are trying to cut electric costs, gas costs, a lot of current costs,” she said, adding that regional governments “couldn’t fund [reforms] in that quantity”. 

Luis Sanz-Menéndez, a research professor at the Institute of Public Goods and Policies, part of the Spanish National Research Council, said shifting to permanent contracts without funding would be a “serious problem”. 

But aside from the unfunded costs, many temporary staff do not have the research experience to qualify for more senior, permanent positions, Professor Pérez Esparrells said. A study found that in 2021, of the more than 25,000 holders of associate lecturer contracts, just 46 per cent had the required doctorate. 

Professor Sanz-Menéndez said universities needed tailored transition plans to recruit the best permanent candidates as there had been “many cases of misuse” of associate lecturer contracts and making poor candidates permanent could cause “long-term damage” and “block the access of new talent”. 

Igor Ahedo, director of the department of political science and administration at the University of the Basque Country, said the best way to facilitate a shift to stable work was to address the dismal state of regional funding.  

The draft law would also require regions to spend 1 per cent of national gross domestic product on universities, a leap for regions such as the Balearic Islands, which spend just 0.23 per cent of GDP. 

“In some autonomous regions it is ridiculous and is conditioned by the interest of certain political formations to devalue public education as a way of giving an advantage to private universities,” said Professor Ahedo.

The draft law, due to be submitted this month, is due to come into force early next year.

ben.upton@timeshighereducation.com