multitude

Any other comments?

All the spon­ta­neous responses to the last ques­tion of the sur­vey car­ried out in 2012.

• “I really hope that Grad­u­ate stu­dents get treated with respect and with fair pay and hours. This is not healthy and not sus­tain­able for our generation.”
• “The sys­tem in Bel­gium is dif­fer­ent from the one in Hol­land. As a recent grad­u­ate you have to work for 2 years as an intern to become an archi­tect. For that rea­son I am seen as an intern,paid as an intern (a bit bet­ter) but accord­ing Dutch rules I am not. Besides that, almost all archi­tects in Bel­gium work free­lance and get the over­hours paid. So the con­tract I have is the worst: free­lance, so no insur­ance and a fixed income, instead of one that relates to your work­ing hours. But I agreed with it myself and until now i didn’t have a lot of overhours…”
• “no”
• “right now I am lucky I have a good job, BUT in the past I also had to do an intern­ship at an office as a grad­u­ate archi­tect with a mas­ter. This office was in Delft, with approx­i­mately 100 employ­ees where 10% at least is interns and then half of them at least are graduates.”
• “Before hav­ing the year con­tract that I have now, I did 3 post­grad­u­ate intern­ships. In total 1 and half year of intern­ships (in 3 diff erent offi ces in The Nether­lands) with aver­age income 700 euros.”
• “Over­work is to gen­eral. I would make it more spe­cific. Which per­cent­age of your over­work do you get com­pen­sated? Is com­pen­sa­tion gen­er­ally reg­u­lated or depen­dend on indi­vid­u­als (project leader,…)? I would add a ques­tion on the posi­tion? How many years work­ing expe­ri­ence com­pared to the func­tion in the office…”
• “great work! keep it up!”
• “It is a great ini­tia­tive! I was think­ing with a friend of mine to do some­thing sim­i­lar. My work­ing con­di­tion are not that bad, but I know about peo­ple work­ing for big offices 80hours/week (!!!) on 40hours con­tract. Over­hours unpaid. Can not call such offices dif­fer­ent than Archi­tec­ture Sweatshops.”
• “In addi­tion to work­ing under­paid and also work­ing unpaid over­hours, there are issues con­cern­ing for exam­ple health insur­ance and pen­sion con­tri­bu­tions, trans­porta­tion expenses and even lunch and dinners…”
• “The offices I work in are small and flex­i­ble so no con­tracts, no agree­ments on hours, there is a lot of ‘over­time’ but at the same time I am not a pris­oner and can do my own stuff when I want, and the part­ners of the fi rm are friendly and ded­i­cated. What is miss­ing in my opin­ion is higher salary!”
• “It is hor­ri­ble to see how offices exploit young pro­fes­sion­als. Some get a con­tract as an intern, while actu­ally they have grad­u­ated already. Oth­ers with up to 6 years of work expe­ri­ence get a con­tract for ‘work-experience-place’; they can’t name it intern­ship, but in this way they are able to have them work for the office with­out a nor­mal wage. For the rest I saw that offices when faced with the end of the last tem­po­rary con­tract, they didn’t want to give per­ma­nent con­tracts, so they didn’t give them any con­tract. The employee was unem­ployed, but the office already said to them ‘don’t look for a job. We’ll hire you back after three months’. The offices say that this is com­pletely legal, but I have my doubts about this.”
• “Cre­ate your own job!”
• “Because of the poor work­ing con­di­tions I’m cur­rently also work­ing in a bar to com­pen­sate for inse­cu­rity I have. Some­times it is expected (required) to work 60 – 80 hours a week, and the next there are no projects so there is no secu­rity. Sec­ondly I’m (almost) required to reg­is­ter at KvK to be able for them not to pay for social secu­rity, essen­tially I’m work­ing for myself with­out being able to pay for social secu­rity as well, because oth­er­wise I can­not be self supportive”
• “intern­ship sucks”
• “great sur­vey, curi­ous to see the result”
• “in gen­eral, in this office, they pro­pose you a first con­tract of intern­ship for 450 euros per month, then another 6 months of intern­ship for 800 euros per month and if there is still enough work for you then you have a con­tract for one year as an archi­tect with the min­i­mal income.But I have to admit that if you nego­ti­ate you can have bet­ter con­di­tions. I worked the first 6 months as an intern for 600 euros netto, then the next 6 months con­tract I nego­ti­ated 1000 euros netto per month as an intern but because of my appli­ca­tion to the WWIK, I asked for 800 euros bruto that means 672 euros netto, 200euros extra black money the last 3 months, plus 480 euros subsidies.Just to let you know how things go. This office is well organ­ised so you don’t have crazy hours but still you work 50 hours at least per week.”
• “Good ini­tia­tive!!!! I changed jobs this year. The main rea­son was per­sonal, I felt stuck in archi­tec­ture (I am not an archi­tect but an engi­neer…) so I wanted some­thing more tech­ni­cal. But I started to have trou­ble with the office poli­cies as well. One of which is under­pay­ing employ­ees which in my opin­ion is a form of slavery…”
• “I’m only one month work­ing in this office, so I can­not judge work­ing hours. How­ever, I think the office I’m work­ing in is par­tic­u­larly con­sid­er­ate to its employees.”
• “great work!”
• “I only made a design for my par­ents who want to built a new home, this is why it was well payed and with “nor­mal” work­ing hours.”
• “because of the cri­sis tho offices abuse of the con­tract and SALARY, but work­ing is health­ier than to do noth­ing and feel useless.”
• “I cur­rently con­sider myself very for­tu­nate to be work­ing here under my cur­rent cir­cum­stances, not a lot of over­time, no unnec­es­sary over­time (bosses are not pre­ten­tious, just real­is­tic) and a fair enough mon­e­tary remu­ner­a­tion (up to the offices pos­si­bil­ity under cri­sis cir­cum­stances). This is rarely true for other archi­tects my age. I have been offered numer­ous 300 euro intern­ships with no pos­si­bil­ity of a long term con­tract before find­ing this. It is absurd and embar­rass­ing for the profession.”
• “I do not care becom­ing rich as long as I man­age to draw beauty!”
• “In gen­eral another world is possible”
• “The office wasn’t too bad in terms of hours worked, occa­sion­ally we did have to work longer hours although if it ran into a few days we might be com­pen­sated in terms of time off — but we would receive per­haps one hour off for every 4 or 5 we worked extra. Often felt excluded from any decision-making process, not just mak­ing them but even explain­ing the rea­sons behind deci­sions would have been appre­ci­ated rather than sim­ply hav­ing orders passed down the line to us.”
• “Since I am not grad­u­ated yet, I am really doing an intern­ship and it is not con­sid­er­ing as a job! thanks”
• “About the ques­tion of the com­pen­sa­tion for my over­work, I asked I do not receive any com­pen­sa­tion. Actu­ally I have 1 hour every 3 over­work­ing hours. But I could not call this a com­pen­sa­tion. Over all when you can­not even choose when to take those com­pen­sa­tion days off.”
• “over­work is com­pen­sated usu­ally with time off. this office didn’t always have such a high per­cent­age of interns, i would say usu­ally it’s about 20 – 30%. in the first 6 months I was paid 500 euros netto. the salary has been raised from the 7^th month on, after I was asked to extend my intern­ship. there’s no per­spec­tive to have a proper con­tract, in fact I ́m gonna have to leave the office by March (in fact they will be 15 months of intern­ship, 9 of which paid as intern “plus” = 800 euros). p.s. this is my 4^th intern­ship since I’m grad­u­ated (2 of them were in Italy).”
• “The inten­sive use of interns con­tracts is degrad­ing. The interns are con­sid­ered as raw mate­r­ial, grad­u­ated archi­tects are hired as interns with­out any pos­si­bil­ity of pro­gress­ing in the com­pany. Once these interns meet their 6 month con­tract they are offered to renew his con­tract as intern or they are replaced by new qual­i­fied archi­tects hired as interns again. Only stu­dents of archi­tec­ture should be hired as interns as part of their learn­ing expe­ri­ence, archi­tects with work­ing expe­ri­ence and recent grad­u­ates should be offered, at least, a junior con­tract with an ini­tial trial period, so that peo­ple have expec­ta­tions of work­ing more than 6 months in the company.”
• “free your hands, free your mind”
• “yes, in the office they say that there are not work, but, how is pos­si­ble? I’m WORKING like an architect…”
• “I’m happy to have a real job but, it is a not fair con­tract is only for three months and before I sign it, my boss warned me that work­ing hours will be twice the signed. I know that by law is 30 hours a week, but if I still want to have a job as an archi­tect after this period of 3 month, I have to work 60 hours a week to keep my posi­tion. I have been only study­ing Archi­tec­ture dur­ing 6 years. Because i like, and now, it seems that there are not work… but, there are, because I’m work­ing, and very hard!”
• “none”
• “Mijn com­pli­menten voor de keuze voor dit onder­zoek, ik ben benieuwd naar de uitkom­sten. Zelf heb ik nooit slechte ervarin­gen gehad bij het bureau waar ik werkte, maar ik hoor wel veel slechte ver­halen om me heen. Miss­chien is de enquête daarom voor mij niet hele­maal rel­e­vant. Mede door de vreemde aan­biedin­gen (zoge­naamde leer­plekken, stages etc.) die mij gedaan wer­den bij het zoeken van een nieuwe baan, heb ik ervoor gekozen een andere weg in te slaan. Ik moet eerlijk zeggen dat dit goed bevalt. Meer per­spec­tief hebben en het gevoel hebben dat er energie in gesto­ken wordt om mij din­gen te leren voelt beter dan het idee inwis­sel­baar te zijn.”
• “Momen­tar­ily there are no interns work­ing, but they are actively search­ing for one.”