Thread by @Cybermatron

Ok. I’ve done it. For the first time in my life I joined a trade union today.

What finally pushed me over the edge? My employer asking us to ensure that any video footage we record is sub-titled to comply with new disability legislation.

To be clear, I am not disputing that the University should do this. If we are using video recordings, sub-titling is imperative to ensure equality of opportunity not just for students with hearing issues but also for those whose first language is not English.

Listening to a recording is not the same as being in a room with your tutor. There will inevitably be comprehension issues. Sub-titling helps with those.

But while the automated sub-titling function of the recording software we use works reasonably well with what my wife calls my “posh English telephone voice”, it’s not perfect. And in my field, Law, the mistakes it makes are important.

They can range from simply confusing my students to making them repeat three impossible things before breakfast later on when they write their essays or exams. So it’s important that they are corrected.

By the University’s own admission, it takes between four and eight minutes to correct one minute of recording. By way of example, I have so far recorded seven hours of video footage for the FIRST HALF of my semester 1 course.

That means that it will take a minimum of *28 hours* to correct the sub-titles on that footage alone.

That is almost a week’s work.

And guess who the University expects to correct those sub-titles?

Bingo! The academic in question “or someone local”.

So I can either take on another week and a half’s unpaid extra work this semester or get into a fight with our admin staff as I try to palm this off on one of them.

I think some of my colleagues have tried that. It didn’t go down too well.

To be clear, neither academics nor support staff have this extra time anywhere in our already busy schedules. We are not hired with a job description that only takes up 70% of our working time with a view to accommodating additional work that might pop up later.

Any commercial company faced with this situation would be aware that in order to comply with this new legal obligation, it must put some additional resource behind the project. It would try to arrange the cheapest way to do this.

Not so in academia.

Why?

Why would any sensible employer allocate this kind of work to someone they pay at the level of even a junior lecturer?

Answer: because as professional employees, who are not paid overtime, academics’ time is infinitely stretchable and can accommodate any number of additional tasks without requiring extra payment. This is by no means the first of those reallocations any of us will have witnessed.

Our secret is that like Hogwarts students, we are all issued with a timeturner at the beginning of each academic year, so that we can work hours over and over and over again until all of our work is done.

Only, we’re not.

We live in finite time and space just like the rest of the population and any additional task that is given to us can only be carried out at the expense of another task, the quality of our work, our private and family life and our physical and mental health.

That is how legal compliance is paid for.

So despite the fact that I don’t always agree with its approach and strategies (which is what held me back from joining so far), I have today joined the @ucu .

Because I can see that this next year the academic ship may finally be hitting the iceberg that we all know we are heading for. And when that happens, I’d like to have a chance to get into a lifeboat.

I’ll see you all when the band plays on.