How to work to contract and reclaim your time: UCU guidance

As you approach the end of your first week of action short of a strike (ASOS) I want to remind you of the importance of reclaiming your time as part of industrial disputes, and working to your contracted hours.   

The purpose of UCU's #ReclaimOurTime ASOS campaign is to continue the disruption caused by last week's strike action and to expose the extent to which this sector only functions because it demands unlimited additional labour from all university staff - labour which comes at an immense cost and personal detriment to the staff who do it, as a recent study by Education Support demonstrated.

As you know, most higher education contracts specify a nominal working week of 35-38 hours, but for many staff there is a contractual stipulation to work beyond those hours as reasonably requested by their line manager.   

Please continue to work only to the hours stipulated in your contract, and within those hours of work please prioritise duties you consider central to your role.

We have provided a timesheet which you can email to your line manager outlining what has not been completed outside of the duties you have prioritised. Your line manager then needs to decide if they would like you to continue working your normal hours or to work additional hours.   

If your line manager requires you to work additional hours, they must quantify those hours to you so that there is a record of the number of hours which they consider to be 'reasonable'. 

Requests to consistently work extra hours are not reasonable.

Remember, your contracts only oblige you to do 'reasonable' additional work, and so you should push back against unreasonable requests. A request to work for X number of extra hours in one week might be reasonable, but a request to work that many extra hours every single week indefinitely and without variation will almost certainly not be reasonable.

The main purpose of this approach is to force an unpalatable choice on your employer. They can either make executive decisions about the amount of extra work they consider 'reasonable' which will be contested and open to challenge by the union, or they can allow you to disrupt the normal functioning of the institution by reducing your workload to a healthy and manageable level.   

If you are a line manager yourself, we need you to take ASOS in the same way. 

If you are a line manager, please only work your contracted hours, and record the tasks you complete and those which are left undone. If admin work relating to ASOS by the colleagues you manage ends up consuming a lot of your time, ask your own manager for instructions as to how this extra work should be accommodated. Ask them to decide which tasks they want you to prioritise and to quantify the number of extra working hours which they consider to be reasonable.   

Line managers - especially heads of departments - have a really important role to play, not just in observing ASOS themselves but also in making the disruption caused by their colleagues' ASOS visible and passing it up the chain of command to senior managers so that they understand the consequences of failing to address the issues we are in dispute over.    

The full ASOS guidance can be found here, and it will be updated as our programme of ASOS escalates to include other types of action beyond working to contract.

Jo Grady 
UCU general secretary