Doubling will cost Windesheim 90,000 euro annually.
- Participation Council (PC) members will from now on have 8 hours per week for their tasks instead of 4.
- The compensation the council members receive increases because the Participation Council got more responsibilities.
The increase on compensation arose from a Sector agreement (Sektorakkoord hbo 2018), where it was agreed upon that students who study at big universities should be facilitated for 8 hours a week. The Executive Board and the Participation Council agree that this change should include employees as well, the four hours a week needs to be doubled to eight. The expansion will take change from the 1st of September 2018 for twenty PC-members and will cost Windesheim 90,000 euros a year. PC-chair Cor Niks: “After carefully examining the work we do and the compensation we receive for said work we found that the two did not correlate. We had half a work day per week for the PC responsibilities which was always used for our meetings. Other responsibilities such as preparatory reading and keeping in touch with our adherents were mostly done in between work or in our own time.”
Because of the new Reinforcement of Administrative Clout Act (Wet Versterking Bestuurskracht), Participation Councils have more responsibilities, influence and rights. One example of this change is that the Participation Council now co-decides on the implementation of the billions for Universities that were subtracted from the student loans. According to Niks the extra hours are necessary because the council wants to fulfil these extra responsibilities. “With these extra hours we have time to discuss the quality of our education during working hours instead of our own time.” The PC had hopes for extra billable hours for the four members of the Executive Committee. The council wanted an increase from 16 to 20 work hours for chair Cor Niks and vice-chair Janet Brijder. They also proposed an increase from 8 to 12 hours a week for chair Myriam Hop and vice-chair Vera Mulder who are representatives of the student members in the PC.
However, the Executive Board did not deem this to be necessary because the general money available is already being raised by 3000 euros. Chair Henk Hagoort: “We will keep the current arrangement in which the Executive Committee gets 1.2 of a fulltime job which translates to 1991 hours of billable hours for the four members of the Executive Committee. When divided by four it is still 322 billable hours more than regular members are paid. It is possible to make an arrangement in which regular council members are expected to do some of the work which the members of the Executive Committee are obligated to do. Furthermore, you can also decide to give the regular members less hours and the members of the Executive Committee more billable hours.” The PC took the advice of Hagoort and decided to assign more billable hours to the Executive Committee. The regular members are allowed to bill 7.3 hours, Niks and Brijder 18.7 hours and the members of the student guidance council 10.7 hours a week.
