The associate professors (Associated PDI) have won the lawsuit filed three years ago for employment discrimination by the University of Valencia (UV) against this group regarding their working hours and a court now recognizes their working hours, tasks and salary improvements .
The trial took place on February 7, after six previous postponements, following the lawsuit filed by more than fifty associate PDI professors against the University of Valencia and the Generalitat for employment discrimination.
According to the ruling of the Social Court number 18 of Valencia, made public this Monday by the group, the UV is ordered to compensate the plaintiffs and “that the same remuneration as what full-time university professors receive, condemning the defendant university to be and go through this resolution.
Three years ago, a group of associate professors of the UV, through the PDI Precariado Platform (PPdiP), filed a lawsuit against the institution regarding the protection of fundamental rights and public freedoms due to salary discrimination and in the calculation of working hours. part-time employment, since these are part-time teaching staff.
The claim was based on the fact that the associate professors are not included in part of the day, as estimated by the ruling, by not recognizing that “associate professors carry out other functions that exceed the class hours and tutorials established in their contracts in relation to their teaching work activity, specifically in their teaching activity in terms of the evaluation procedure and criteria, the same structure of the Bologna Plan is required for associate professors with continuous evaluation of the students as the base criterion of the teaching programming, informing the student about their progress and evaluation.
And furthermore, “carrying out, like the rest of the university professors, the preparation of classes, preparation of materials, and the same management tasks outside of teaching, as stated in the responses of the Rector of the UV.”
The ruling also condemns the UV “to pay each of the actors the amount of 1,000 euros as compensation for moral damages,” although according to the ruling it is “a merely symbolic compensation.”
For the teaching staff, this ruling has “strong repercussions on the recognition of the working hours of the associate teaching staff and on the set of tasks they perform beyond the formality of their employment contract and what university laws say.”
On the other hand, it also has consequences on the remuneration of the Associate PDI, not only of the UV, but of all Spanish universities.
This opens the door to improving the work and salary of this group of teachers, “so mistreated economically and professionally by the universities and the different administrations,” they add from the PPdiP platform, whose leaders are “open” to a negotiation in three areas. to face the repercussions of the sentence.
On the one hand, they urge the UV to open a negotiation, with a view to the next academic year, to adjust the salaries of the associated teaching staff to the proportion of the day they work, as well as to pay them five-year teaching periods and six-year research periods as recognized by various rulings from different courts.
Likewise, they urge the Valencian Government and its president, Carlos Mazón, to sit down and negotiate with the representatives of this group the salary improvements that the ruling entails and to modify the Decree published less than a year ago on the remuneration of university teaching staff. Valencians.
Finally, they ask the Ministry of Universities and its head, Diana Morant, to immediately negotiate the PDI Statute so that it incorporates the tasks recognized by the ruling, as tasks also belonging to the associate professors and not only as full-time PDI tasks.
