‘Illegal’ terms and conditions add to academic overwork crisis

Anyone working outside of academia always wonders how we do a 70 hour week without any government body intervening. Staff are expected to work on Saturdays for no extra pay, and to do numerous tasks with no time built in to do them. Plus staff are now the chatbots for universities. No wonder staff burnout is on the rise.

My experience in academia is that some coursework and exam marking deadlines are unrealistic. Where I used to work, we were told to provide feedback to students within three weeks regardless of the number of students in the class. The pressure here was to obtain favourable feedback for the National Student Survey. Sometimes, additional markers were allocated to alleviate the pressure, but such markers would not be as familiar with the coursework hence affecting the quality of the assessment. Unfortunately these pressures led to a culture of putting in 50+ hours of work per week to meet these deadlines. This problem is one of the reasons for the increase in workload, which is unacceptable.

The length of time allocated to mark an assignment is totally unrealistic. Instead of 30 minutes, in reality, it may take two hours to read, mark and write comprehensive feedback to students.

Academic workload calculations are imprecisely evaluated and do not fully account for all academic tasks. It is common to disregard distributive fairness in the distribution of workload throughout faculties. Additionally, assigning workloads is occasionally used as a form of retaliation against employees who voice their disapproval with unethical behaviour at the university.

If anyone would like to convert the potential illegality identified in the paper into concrete union branch action, there is a suggestion outlined in this video https://youtu.be/MXt4oOD25O4