And yet, the highest salaries get more “pennies” in collective labour agreement at universities

It is an interesting question in collective labour agreement negotiations: how do you increase wages? If you give everyone the same percentage increase, high-income employees benefit more than low-income employees.

Let's look at a quick calculation example. Imagine that wages increase by 10 per cent. Someone who earns 3,000 euros per month will then receive an extra 300 euros per month. Their boss's salary will jump from, say, 10,000 to 11,000 euros. That's a difference of 700 euros per month.

Petition
That is why activist professors who consider their own salaries high enough are saying: it is better to give everyone a fixed amount of pay rise rather than a percentage. That is more favourable for employees at the bottom of the ladder. They launched a petition for professors and senior lecturers, which has now been signed more than 1,200 times. The accompanying slogan is “pennies instead of percentages”.

To illustrate, imagine that the two employees in our example receive an additional 600 euros. For the employee with the lower income, that is a 20 percent pay rise, while for his boss it is 6 percent.

In the new collective labour agreement for universities, this is done in two ways. Gross wages will increase by 2 per cent and, in addition, everyone will receive an extra 100 euros per month (for a full-time job). A little bit of percentages and a little bit of cents.

Percentages
We first converted this into percentages. For the university wage increases, this means that wages in the lowest scales will increase twice as fast (5.6 percent) as in the highest scales (2.8 percent). The image below shows the percentage wage increase. On the far left you see scale 1, which includes cleaners, for example, and on the far right are the highest-paid professors.

Euros
But if you convert the collective agreement agreements into hard euros per month, you get the opposite picture. The lowest incomes will increase by 155 euros, while the highest incomes will receive more than double that amount: 345 euros.

The top salary of a university employee (excluding administrators) is then 4.3 times higher than the lowest salary: 12,239 euros compared to 2,742 euros. Viewed in this light, the wage gap has narrowed slightly: in the previous CLA, the lowest salary was 4.5 times lower than the highest.

Activists
The activists are satisfied with the result they have achieved. ‘As far as we are concerned, the glass is half full and this is a great step forward,’ says Groningen professor Laura Batstra, one of the initiators of the petition. She hopes that other organisations will follow suit.

This is because the wage increase for the lower scales is higher than inflation, says Batstra. ‘Nevertheless, in our opinion, they could have done even better. Inflation hits people with less money harder than people with more money.’

The AOb education union calls it an agreement with a social edge. ‘In this round, we have worked hard to ensure that the salary increase is also paid out in cents,’ says director Douwe Dirk van der Zweep. ‘This has already been achieved in other collective labour agreements, such as for higher professional education and secondary vocational education. Because, indeed, high inflation hit people with little financial margin the hardest. We are pleased that this has been achieved.’

The universities are also satisfied, says a spokesperson. They had an ‘express wish to pay at least part of the salary increase in percentages,’ says a spokesperson, because they believe it is important ‘that universities remain an attractive employer, even in the higher salary scales.’