Chapter 5 Page 180 of 332 enterprise agreement. In the first years of my work at the university, I think I was even more overloaded with teaching and service, and work that did not seem to fit or count anywhere. I did not understand enough about the system to advocate effectively for myself. Managers always said there was no more money in the budget for more staff, for help with marking. The managers were clear they were
responsible to higher managers to bring their areas in close to allocated budgets. I worked every weekend and many nights to manage my job.
I think my immediate managers probably did, and do, what is possible to allocate work within the parameters of the workload model, but the model does not adequately recognise the length of time needed to perform different tasks in
different contexts; it does not recognise the variety of tasks or work that must be done to get the work done. The unrecognised work necessary to do the work includes the time it takes to set up a classroom for a simulation or practice skills session with students, time to keep pace with the constant technological changes, the time to read the endless emails that may inform of a change in policy or practice that you have to implement, or emails telling you of the amazing achievements of others who secure grants or win awards, time to navigate changes in the university website, time to adapt to changes in the online teaching platform, time to secure and manage external markers, time to find the current electronic location of the forms we have to fill out for everything.
So much of the administrative work has been devolved to academics. We: transfer student results from one online environment and data entry them to a spreadsheet, fill out electronic forms to book a car, to apply for a grant, to report on the grant, to report the air-conditioning is not working, to request anything. Just searching for, finding and filling out one form correctly can take far too long. The WAM states there are 1690 hours of paid work in a full-time year of 46 weeks. It seems a bit cynical and cruel when the maths of the formula can never work when so
much of the work done by academics is not counted as work – it is just invisible. I
don’t know anyone, at least in the less senior ranks, that does not work beyond this
Chapter 5 Page 181 of 332 labour. The PPR process ensures we all feel the necessity to go beyond the 1690 paid hours in order to earn our place, keep earning our place, and to get the rewards of being allocated the units we would like to teach, or being provided with the
maximum amounts of external marking or time for research, or with small grants to do research or attend conferences. The work involved in preparing for AASW re- accreditations is huge and does not seem to be counted in workloads. (A5.4, October 2014).
This account highlights the tensions whereby academics can love their job whilst feeling overwhelmed and alienated by those parts of it that are not recognised, not resourced or administrative. The informant realises that in self-managing and self-exploiting, working at nights and on weekends, to deal with the overwork, she enables the managerialist
university to make profit with free labour. Jeannie Rea (2016), President of the National Tertiary Education Union reports that the ‘unpaid work undertaken by university staff in Australia represents a donation of about 16, 000 full-time jobs or about 1.7 billion in unpaid
labour’. As Casey Brienza observes, ‘…the habit of self-exploitation individualizes
employment risk and blocks collective solutions to sector-wide occupational problems’
(Brienza, 2016, p.107).
This self-exploitation is further understood from the relational perspective of class, as introduced in Chapter 1. The informant lecturer, at the second bottom level of the academic ranking structure, has less autonomy and authority within the organisational hierarchy in relation to production, than the Senior Lecturers, Associate Professors and Professors, above her in the academic stream. The informant also has less autonomy and authority compared to middle and senior administration staff. The ability of higher level managers to avoid sanctions and to achieve rewards, often bonuses (Aspromourgos, 2012),
for budget constraint reveal the existence and nature of ‘mutually antagonistic self-interest’
(Prins et al., 2015, p.1354) between managers and more junior workers in the university. This is evident where the material welfare of managers relies causally on the material deprivations of more junior workers, such as the self-exploitation of the informant.
Chapter 5 Page 182 of 332 The technology of oppressions includes the stress, described above by the
informant, of doing the invisible and unrecognised work that academics need to do to do the work that is counted in workload formulas, or to do work that the academic values. This concern is recognised more broadly by researchers such as Gornall and Salisbury (2012, p.
139) who describe the work needed to be done to do the work as the ‘meta-logistics of the
modern academic workload’. Similar to the description above by the informant, Polster
(2012, p.125) writes of the ‘daily announcements, memos and workshops introducing and
explaining university rules and their continual changes’, many of which also inform of
greater administrative and regulatory burdens.
The following section describes, from the relational perspective of class, how junior lecturers are more vulnerable to the disciplinary measures of policies such as the staff codes of conduct.
ACADEMIC FREEDOM SUBJECT TO LOYALTY TO THE CORPORATION
In the next journal entry (Narrative 18), the informant describes how she learns of changes
in the RU (PRU4) Staff Code of Conduct that prioritises loyalty to the university as a
corporation, over academic freedom.