News
Tired of unpaid extra hours
Three out of four lecturers at the University of Gothenburg do not think that the hours they have been allocated for teaching are enough for the work they put in, and half of them do at least 5 unpaid hours of extra work a month. This was revealed by a survey that Saco-S conducted among its members in December. JUST BEFORE the GU Journal's deadline, around 400 of the 1,700 lecturers had had time to respond to the survey that Saco had sent out to its members at the University of Gothenburg. The preliminary results are in line with SULF's nationwide report, Nu får det vara nog – om det gränslösa, obetalda arbetet i akademin (We’ve had enough – about the limitless, unpaid work within academia) – which showed that almost 70 percent of lecturers worked more than their regular working hours in 2020, and that most of them were not paid for it. – The pandemic has really only made the flaws in the system more visible. We need to find another way to quantify the work that lecturers actually do. Our survey indicates that almost every third lecturer at the University of Gothenburg estimates that they do at least 120 extra hours a year, which is considered normal according to the culture that prevails at several faculties, says Maja Pelling, Saco Chairperson at the University of Gothenburg. In the last issue of the GU Journal, we wrote several articles based on SULF's national report. What largely emerged,
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GUJOURNAL DECEMBER 2021
in interviews with the vice-chancellor and others, was that the unpaid work within academia is basically a national problem. And sure, Maja Pelling agrees with that. The parliament and the government are not prepared to invest the resources needed to maintain the quality of education – they ignore the problems and hide behind a variety of factors and calculation models. But the same thing applies to the University of Gothenburg, she says. – The employment conditions at the local university are not the responsibility of the governme-
Maja Pelling points out that each university has a responsibility for the work environment.
nt, nor is the work environment. There has to be accountability in the university's organisation. Heads of department, for example, are responsible for health and safety, something which is not always apparent. THE LECTURERS' system of
annual working hours, which can conceal and make invisible reductions in reimbursement for lecturing, is something that is important to pay attention to in this context, says Maja Pelling. – If I as a lecturer am allocated a reduced course budget due to cutbacks, it means that I may
