Work permits hinder non-EU UvA students in their search for part-time jobs
Looking for a part-time job alongside your studies? For many students, that is simply a matter of approaching the nearest café or restaurant. For UvA students from outside the European Union, however, the process involves navigating a bureaucratic maze, which is enough to put many employers off. As a result, these students often remain unemployed for months.
Non-EU UvA students struggle to find part-time work alongside their studies. This emerges from conversations Folia had with several students from Asia and South America, and is also confirmed by Nuffic, the organisation for internationalisation in education. The main reason is that these students must find an employer willing to apply for a work permit (TWV).
Applying for such a permit is mandatory when hiring employees from outside the EU. However, the process comes with several complications for employers. The UWV, the Dutch Employee Insurance Agency, takes five weeks to decide whether to grant a permit. In addition, once they have obtained one, non-EU students can work a maximum of sixteen hours a week. Many employers therefore back out, as they feel the administrative burden is not worth the limited number of hours the students can actually work.
According to a Nuffic spokesperson, permits are more often applied for by employers “who are familiar with the TWV and the procedure, such as institutions or international companies, than by a catering business that does not know what the procedure entails. This is unfortunate, because for non-specialized work, the TWV procedure is often automated.”
Let Us Werk!
It is not uncommon for non-EU UvA students to spend months looking for work before finding an employer willing to hire them. Io Carpiso (23), a Global Arts, Culture and Politics student, received nothing but rejections even after a year of applying for jobs. The Filipino student therefore took matters into her own hands, compiling a directory of employers in Amsterdam, Amstelveen and Haarlem who were willing to hire people from outside the EU. At the beginning of this year, that steadily growing list resulted in the website Let Us Werk!, where students can see at a glance, on a map of the city, which businesses they can apply to.
“We have now emailed around 400 to 500 employers to ask whether they hire people from outside the EU. Around 100 have responded positively. They can all be found on the website,” says Carpiso.
Months of searching
According to Carpiso, the fact that she felt compelled to build an entire website is a clear sign that something is wrong. Her own network at the UvA is full of students with similar stories. Psychology student Alex Kieu (19), for instance, recently spent six months unemployed before finally finding work in the kitchen of a Vietnamese restaurant. “It was always the same. As soon as I mentioned during a job application that I wasn’t from the EU, I would hear nothing more. At one point, I even started wondering whether I was sending my applications to the wrong email addresses.”
The students are all familiar with these stories. Their fellow students with EU passports seem to find part-time jobs with ease, while they themselves spend months searching. “Employers never explicitly say that they don’t want to hire us because of the permit, but they sometimes hint at it. They don’t seem to think it is worth investing the time and effort in a part-time employee,” says Kieu.
At the mercy of employers
Even when these students do manage to find an employer willing to hire people from outside the EU, they remain at the mercy of their boss. It can sometimes take months for a promised permit to actually be arranged. And when they want to move to a new job, they depend on their former employer, who must terminate the work permit in such cases.
For Hanh Nhu (22), a Vietnamese bachelor’s student in Global Arts, Culture and Politics, this is the reason she is still unemployed. It has been five months since she decided to leave her previous job, but after months of searching, when a new job finally seemed within reach, she discovered that her former employer had never withdrawn her work permit. As a result, she was unable to work anywhere else. “I had simply carried on applying for jobs all that time because I didn’t know I was still registered as an employee with my previous employer. My permit was only terminated there a month ago,” she says.
