Workload—the increasingly overwhelming onslaught of deadlines, administrivia, course-preps, projects, supervisions, marking, reporting, writing, meetings, experiments, editing, and endless emails—is becoming close to unbearable for many of us. For most of us, workload is our top concern and burden. We use words like burnout and panic and despair and heartache and breakdown to describe how hard we are working and how little we feel in control of our workload. This problem of workload persists across ranks and job-titles, from librarians to full professors. In this round we’re proposing some significant fixes for the worst of these issues. We don’t know if UBC will see the logic in creating a sustainable working environment, but we know it’s important!
We concentrate in this bargaining post on principles that should apply to all of us. We also focus, of necessity, on assigned workload (assigned service and credit teaching for faculty, or as variously defined for librarians), as these are the parts of our workload most directly prescribed for us. We also build here on the clear principle in the Collective Agreement (CA) that department heads are rightly and logically the ones managing and scheduling assigned workload.
Within those contexts, we are seeking progress in the following key workload issues:
- Protection against inequitable increases in assigned workloads: We’ve seen this across the board and over time: significant increases in class-sizes, a bizarre increase in credit-loads (especially at UBCO), and no commensurate increase in pay or decrease in other job-requirements. UBC needs not to be balancing its books on the backs of the employees carrying out its central academic mission. UBC needs not to be asking the same people to do more than they were hired to do, more than they are paid to do, and more than they can manage to do.
- Equity in assigned workload is crucial: we need to be able to count on a fair distribution of work in our units. We have made progress on this in recent rounds, but our academic units need specific and consistent guidance on all of the factors that contribute to an equitable sharing of assigned work across our various job-categories and within our academic communities. We are proposing both guidelines for collegially developed workload policies AND a clear check-list for heads to consider when making annual service and teaching assignments.
- Collegial governance: We think it’s crucial that we collectively play a role in establishing our department’s workload policies, so that our practices are transparent and accountable. Likewise, we think that academics need to have a significant say when UBC adopts new technologies that affect our working lives. We are often the ones who both invent and have to live with such systems, and we think it is a win-win proposition to include our perspectives in those implementation processes.
Our Collective Agreement allows for and recognizes the many different cultures existing across our campuses in our departments, and we think this is sensible for a big, complex university like UBC. Departments need room to develop their own collegial and discipline-specific protocols, while the CA provides criteria to measure fairness, processes for protecting our self-directed work, and guidance for heads and units as they schedule our assigned work. So that none of us are crushed.
