Overload

Posted on | July 17, 2009 | 8 Comments

Think your job is bad? Read this. Overload reports on “the role of work-volume escalation and micro-management of academic work patterns in loss of morale and collegiality at UWS.”

Apart from highlighting the inadequacies of workload formulae across every level of academic life, it’s also one of the best reports I’ve read showing the impact of online technology on academic work.

The figures are stunning enough. Number of those surveyed who worked on weekends: 100%. UWS staff/student ratio: 1:23. And be sure to check out the pie chart comparing Level A appointments.

A sample of quotes:

- “It is now 5.15pm. I have been up since 4am marking assignments and I still haven’t finished”

- “I had to turn around 86 hours of marking in 10 days. 86 hours is what I actually get paid presuming I can mark 1,000 words every 20 minutes, which I can’t…”

- “In 2008 I have taught 7 different units none of which I have taught before”

- “This year I travelled to other campuses twice per week. I had a WLA for 7 return trips but had to undertake 13 return trips to see students and collect exams. $300 in tolls”

I came across this amazing research while trying to find out about the union’s recent campaigns – part of ongoing preparations for the State of the Industry conference happening in November. We may yet hear more about this, and hopefully one of the study’s research team will agree to speak on Day 1. But so far, in spite of numerous emails and phone calls, the NTEU President doesn’t seem available, or at least hasn’t told us one way or another over the past 3 months. I’m quite disappointed about this, since so much anecdotal evidence would suggest the NTEU’s profile could do with some boosting. I had thought the conference offered a timely opportunity for the industry’s peak representative body to prove its relevance to a significant part of its constituency.

Maybe I’ve just gone about asking the wrong way. If the report is any indication of the wider experience of contemporary worklife, our President is probably drowning in email and can’t imagine any way of handling the amount of communication requests she receives…

Category: Academia, Politics, State of the Industry 2009, Work
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Comments

8 Responses to “Overload”

  1. glen
    July 17th, 2009 @ 11:49 pm

    class sizes about right!

  2. melgregg
    July 18th, 2009 @ 11:21 am

    I can’t get out of my head the thought of the person who bought a house near uni, only for management to move their teaching to the campus 50kms away.

  3. glen
    July 20th, 2009 @ 1:34 pm

    wow that is fucked up!

  4. Andrew
    July 20th, 2009 @ 9:11 pm

    I think the national NTEU should maybe rethink it’s approach (and I’m on the executive at UNSW—good people, doing good things). There’s a lot of concern within the NTEU about working conditions, but the approaches for the past few years haven’t really achieved much, in part because I think at the national level, the work is treated as if it’s performed like any other work (that is, with fixed hours, etc), and the union is completely plugged in to “what unions do”. However, academic work is just not structured like, eg. mining. Until this changes things won’t be great imho, but we live in hope.

  5. melgregg
    July 22nd, 2009 @ 12:20 pm

    That’s right, the report is so good for showing the implications of focusing on hours. When the very mechanism for staking claims cannot register the work being performed, there’s a major problem. And then, think of all the things people don’t even “count” as work – like email, as my research is showing. Labour politics in an information economy needs to recognise the work of communication, and that it takes place in a range of locations, at a range of times. But no one feels empowered to say that there should be limits on this kind of experience because it’s couched in the language of flexibility.

  6. glen
    July 22nd, 2009 @ 1:26 pm

    “because it’s couched in the language of flexibility”

    plus it kind of hijacks friendship networks so it becomes very muddled and boundaries need to be established

  7. Christian
    July 30th, 2009 @ 6:12 pm

    Those quotes are completely resonant with my experience as well, I had 400 assignments end of last semester, some lost nights, and always on new subjects with no allocation to rewrite them. I have a subject with a class size of 41, and I’m not alone. We have a new staff member, level A, who has been given five DEGREES to convene, seven subjects to convene, and no teaching.

  8. Barry
    September 3rd, 2009 @ 5:47 pm

    yep, sounds familiar.

    I wrote, taught, tutored and marked a course at UQ a few years ago, and when I tallied up the number of hours vs pay, I would have been better off washing dishes. I would have been paid *double*.

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