Comments on: Overload

By: Barry

Barry — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 07:47:19 +0000

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*.

By: Christian

Christian — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 08:12:15 +0000

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.

By: glen

glen — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 03:26:57 +0000

“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

By: melgregg

melgregg — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 02:20:26 +0000

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.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 11:11:19 +0000

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.

By: glen

glen — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 03:34:36 +0000

wow that is fucked up!

By: melgregg

melgregg — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 01:21:07 +0000

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.

By: glen

glen — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 13:49:35 +0000

class sizes about right!