Sorbonne trials four-day week so staff can get second jobs

The four-day working week is at the forefront of European discussions about work-life balance after the pandemic, but one of France’s leading universities is trialling it for quite different reasons.

Sorbonne University is employing staff on 80 per cent full-time-equivalent contracts so that they can top up civil servant salaries with other work.

Candidates for technical and support roles at Parisian universities have enjoyed a reversal of labour market conditions in the past two years, said Pascal Frey, Sorbonne’s vicepresident of human, financial and digital resources. Four years ago, advertisements for technical or administrative vacancies would give the university its pick. In the past two years, candidates have asked: “What can you do for me?”

“We have experimented with it in different departments, for instance in the IT department, because there’s lots of technicians or engineers that are really skilled people, and it’s quite easy for them to transfer their expertise,” Professor Frey said. The policy is being tentatively trialled with other teams.

He said staff could find training or consultancy work on the spare day, or use the time to improve their own skills. “It’s not increasing directly the salary, but giving the flexibility to people to get an extra income,” he said, adding that salaries for skilled support staff were better in other public roles and can be five times higher in the private sector.

But Karin Fischer, a professor of Irish and British studies at the University of Orléans who helped develop the 2022 higher education election programme for the left-wing presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, described the trial as “a rather desperate scheme for desperate times”.

“Salaries have fallen significantly over the last 20 years in comparison with other European countries, and with similar private jobs in France. The appropriate response should, of course, be for the state to increase those salaries enough to attract the required staff, not for university presidents to reduce the

The growing backlog creates a “chicken and egg” scenario, whereby new recruits are quickly burnt out by overwork. “Sometimes we fill the position for a month or two and then the people leave because they realise it won’t get back to a normal situation for two or three years,” he acknowledged.

number of workdays,” she said.

Martin Andler, an emeritus professor of mathematics at the University of Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, acknowledged that computer science support staff at his institution could be paid three times their salary if they went to the private sector.

“Pragmatically, it might be an intelligent way to do the differentiation, which is probably necessary, because we do have a hard time with our very low salaries attracting good people in these fields,” he said of the Sorbonne initiative.

Of the roughly 3,000 administrative roles at the Sorbonne, around 200 are unfilled, a figure that “keeps on increasing”, Professor Frey said.

The growing backlog creates a “chicken and egg” scenario, whereby new recruits are quickly burnt out by overwork. “Sometimes we fill the position for a month or two and then the people leave because they realise it won’t get back to a normal situation for two or three years,” he acknowledged.

But there was no need to extend the experiment to academic staff, as recruitment is generally good, Professor Frey said.

French labour laws controlling academics’ second jobs have been progressively loosened, allowing academics to be more involved in startups and other companies. But Professor Andler cautioned that some staff in fields such as law and medicine had gone “completely overboard” with second jobs, leaving their academic work an afterthought.