Category: Workload

Full-time teaching for Sessional Lecturers in Education at UBC is 15 credits/term (yes, really), and they make less per credit than anyone else at UBC. If they teach fewer than 7.5 credits in a term, they are still considered less than half-time and do not qualify for most UBC benefits. We need to fix these inequities for our Sessional Lecturer colleagues at UBC, and not just in Education. Most Sessional Lecturers hold PhDs or other terminal degrees and teach a significant number of UBC’s courses; many Sessional Lecturers also do curricular work, service, and research in their disciplines on their own time, unpaid. All Sessional Lecturers deserve to be treated fairly and paid as the highly-qualified professionals they are.

It would be hard to over-state how much of a problem workload is for our membership. Everybody feels it; everybody wants it fixed. So: members who have read our “Day One” proposals will have noticed our Proposal #2: “The Association proposes to modify Part 1, Article 13 and Part 5, Article 7, to create workload language that is consistent with best practices at major Canadian research universities.” What exactly do we mean by that?

We know from our consultations that workload has created significant problems for most of our members, and we are addressing those in several different proposals. Here in Proposal #2, we are asserting one broad principle that appeals to the whole membership, and two that apply more specifically to the members (librarians and tenure-track faculty) with a pronounced mix of assigned and self-directed work. We have other workload proposals to address the additional specific issues facing Lecturers and Sessional Lecturers as well; these will be the subject of future bargaining posts.

Workload is a major concern for UBC faculty and librarians alike.

In every bargaining survey from 2010 to the present, we have consistently heard that you are struggling with unhealthy workloads and difficult work-life balance challenges and significantly dissatisfied with the transparency and equity of workload assignments. The University’s Work Experience Survey (WES) confirms this unhappiness with workload…

Prior to the 2010 Bargaining Round the Association conducted its usual survey of its members. In that round, responding to many comments we had been receiving from members, we inserted a special section in the survey on workload. What we found was significant dissatisfaction with the transparency and equity of workload assignments, as well as a concern that many members were suffering from unhealthy workloads and difficult work-life balance challenges. At that time we developed a proposal to the University on faculty workload that aimed to make sure that our members would experience a healthy and productive work environment, with workloads assigned collegially, fairly and equitably. We based our proposal on workload language at other universities like the University of Toronto, Western and Queens, but particularly focussed on the University of Toronto.

We are hearing increasingly from faculty who are concerned with the rising demands placed on them, especially with respect to teaching and service, and with the way workload is managed in their units.