Academics in Germany and Austria are stuck in job limbo
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Yvonne Völkl is a literature and cultural studies researcher at the Technical University of Graz's cluster for Human-Centered Computing. There, she leads a project analyzing novels written via letter in 18th and 19th century Spain. If you're thinking a computing department at a technical university is a weird place for a literature scholar, you're correct — and the reason Yvonne ended up here is revealing.
In 2021, Yvonne won a grant from the FWF, Austria's premier research funding agency, for a timely project on the coronavirus pandemic in fiction. Like many researchers, she was on a fixed-term contract. But Yvonne thought winning a competitive grant would make it straightforward to renew her contract at the University of Graz. It didn't.
"The project started, and then on the second day of my project, they said: ah, we cannot employ you," she recalled. Yvonne had no idea this could even happen until it happened to her. The notorious paragraph 109 of Austria's university law, nicknamed the chain-contract rule or Kettenvertragsregelung, limits how long researchers can work on fixed-term contracts. A 2021 reform sharpened the rule, limiting fixed-term employment at the same university to 8 years — applied retroactively.
Yvonne says she was eventually able to work with the university HR department to find a work-around solution: she could act quickly to transfer to the project before the new rule took effect, though doing so would require terminating her existing contract early and losing salary during the gap between projects. But even that exception wasn't made for one of the colleagues on Yvonne's project. In the end, the only way to keep the project team intact was to move to a new institution and start new "chains" of contracts.
"So this is how my colleagues and I ended up here," says Yvonne. "And one of the colleagues, he couldn't stand this precarity anymore. He looked for a job somewhere else."
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