Following attendance at a recent UCU training, LUCU is seeking to recruit a number of workload representatives. These are essentially health and safety reps, with the statutory rights that this entails, but with a special focus on workload, one of the biggest issues facing members.
Workload reps are department representatives who can:
- Talk to members about workload as a health and safety issue
- Plan surveys and analyse data on working conditions
- Negotiate workload formulas and policies with management
- Write newsletter articles, grow visibility, and develop campaigns
- Work with EDI, H&S, and negotiating committees
During the training, a number of potential challenges to organising to lower workload were discussed, such as management withholding information, staff being afraid to speak up, workloads too high to take on union work, and not enough reps.
But ways forward were identified: boosting union visibility with badges, posters and lanyards, starting with smaller departmental meetings to talk about workload and build trust, training members as reps and making sure they get the time allocation to which they are entitled, writing anonymous pieces about workload impact for future newsletters, discuss issues on personal emails and chat platforms rather than university systems, and making business-case arguments about reducing workload to management (like reducing sickness absence levels).
While it may seem that ever increasing workload is an insurmountable problem, we learned that if warranted, workload complaints can even be taken to the HSE if needed.
The training centred on evidence gathering as a starting point in any workload campaign. This could be from multiple sources: UCU surveys, absence figures, member discussions, and our own LUCU workload survey. Key questions might include:
- What are work-related stress levels like?
- How much unpaid overtime are staff doing?
- Are workload model allocations realistic?
- How much presenteeism (working when unwell) is happening?
LUCU is currently taking steps to help tackle high workloads through our Workload Project Group, which incoming workload reps would be invited to join. If you’re interested in becoming a Workload Rep, have questions, want to get more involved, or simply share your workload experiences to help us create change, please contact us.