Mailund on the Internet

This is un-f*cking-believable! I didn’t get any salary for February. The sad part is, it doesn’t surprise me one bit!

Starting February 1st, I am funded by a new research project (very similar to the one I was funded by before and essentially from the same research council) and this means that my contract with the university needs to be renewed. No problem there, really, this is mainly a question of signing a new contract identical to the one I had before, and that is that. I took care of that weeks ago.

Now, the funny thing is that, even though nothing really changes, the personnel office will consider you a new employee or something. At least, it looks that way to me. Every single time — I mean every single time – I’ve gone through this, there has been problems with the personnel office and I haven’t received my salary the first month or two.

Except for a post doc in Oxford, I’ve been employed by the University of Aarhus since 1997. In my first job there — as a student programmer in a research group — the first payment was a month delayed. When I started my PhD studies, my grant was delayed. When I started at Bioinformatics, I didn’t get paid the first three months, ’cause those payments were delayed. When I changed project, I went without salary a month. Then again. Now it is happening once again!

What is it that is so difficult to manage, here? If I am employed by the university — bringing my own grant money, I might add — I should get paid. That is how it works in the rest of the world. I’ve never heard of any private company getting away with something like this. There must be hundreds of cases like this at the uni every single year. Most of the researchers are employed on time-limited contracts that gets renewed every few years (if we manage to get the grant money for renewing them).

Of course, I don’t know how usual my case is, but it has hit me every single time I’ve renewed my contract — and I am not the only one who’s been in this situation…

Is this a general university thing, or just in Aarhus?

Are they just exploiting that we love our work, so they can walk all over us with no risk of us leaving?

This pisses me off, it really does, but I fear that there is absolutely nothing I can do about it, except sit down and pray that they fix the problem soon so I only miss one month salary and not two…

Grrr!