Welcome to the Papera Collective website, where we share all of the higher education and public research news in France. Our main focus is the labor contracts and funding of the French Public Research and Higher Education System. So if you are in those sorts of fields or you are looking to get some kind of employment within the Public Education and Research field, then our site is relevant to your interests.
Through the articles and discussions that we share on our website, we seek to improve the condition of many of those who are working in the public education and research field within French universities. We want to try and reach out to everyone in those sorts of fields, so it is our goal to share all of the news as it relates to French Education Community.
Who is Papera Collective for?
Graduates, downgraded, proletarian, invisible and often exploited, some of us are in great precariousness, and all the others know that it is not very far. The labor market within the higher education field of the French System is very contractural and prone to being very unstable. Thus, a lot of graduates are not even paid the proper wage.
We must obey the administration and other local university authorities who hold laboratories, universities, departments, ministries and even associations. So we decided to raise our heads to create a dialogue, develop a network, build concrete solutions to our problems of precariousness on a daily basis in the laboratories and universities but also face the state that employs us outside the common law, we disqualify ourselves from the labor market. We are committed to dealing with knowledge subcontractors who operate in laboratories, universities, industry or services.
Officially the precarious represent a fourth of staff of the Higher Education and Research, not counting doctoral students and those who work under the table at schools. The current reforms aim to increase this figure by reinforcing the hierarchical and administrative arbitrariness that prevails more and more often to access the statutory posts and the most basic exercise conditions. The government uses insecurity as an insidious means to further weaken the contractual workers within Higher Education and Research.
Why Papera Collective aims to change the system:
The current system is based on the exploitation of people under constant pressure relayed by local hierarchies on short contracts. This is 13 and 6 months on average at the for post-doc students and teaching contracts respectively, illegal or without social security cover, pension contribution, etc., or nonexistentlabor contracts! The government prides itself on putting research at the forefront of its concerns but allocates significant financial resources only to better subject the Higher Education and Research field to the policy. Thus the public research and education department is endowed with 955 million euro in 2008 and the Research Tax Credit, generous gift to the industry, should cost 3.2 billion euro per year.
Scheduled destruction of public education and research shows government’s willingness to end many knowledge sectors that are “too unprofitable” such as archaeology or classical letters, which will be relegated to the goodwill of patronage.
It is also the announced end of autonomous researchers, tomorrow experts at orders, forced to be accountable to their powerful funders well before returning to society. It is the official sanction of the reign of arbitrariness in the public institutions of scientific and technological nature and the universities university presidents and college deans, with the impossibility of having a free and fundamental research already very weakened. Research guided by the common good and the public service must come before small private interests.
The collective Papera wants to be an independent network of information and action to fight against precariousness in all its forms in the education and research system, and elsewhere by demanding a stability of the employment, a revalorization of the careers and a transparent and democratic control of the scientific and administrative authorities by the actors of the research, not by a private company created to measure by the government, or by networks of corporate influences. We also demand the end of precariousness and arbitrariness in the public education research and universities. We also reject the precariousness experienced by all workers irrespective of their sector, as well as the destruction of basic social benefits such as retirement, education, and health.
Our site is always open to discussion for those working in public universities and in general research in the French System. We are always open to acquiring new members and readers to end the plight of precarious labor within the French public universities.