Finnish Education Employers (FEE) board member and Rector of the University of Helsinki, Sari Lindblom, opened a public debate on the university collective bargaining game (article in Finnish).
The article makes it embarrassingly clear how those in university management are distanced from the reality of university work. I for one would like to believe that it is simply ignorance, and not a collective agreement negotiation agenda.
Lindblom’s choice of words seems to make her nostalgic for the time when she herself took her first steps in her university career. The working time agreement for teaching focused roles (and now also for researchers) has been in force at the University of Helsinki since 1998. Until 1998, teachers working at the University of Helsinki had teaching duties defined by title. If, for example, 4 hours of teaching were missed, substitute assignments or withholding of pay were negotiated. In this world, it was therefore important to keep track of the hours taught.
So, for 27 years, the University of Helsinki has been following an agreement not to monitor working time on the basis of time or periods of time. Now Lindblom seems to want to return to the old days by writing about the monitoring of working hours contrary to the collective agreement.
The situation was very problematic and rigid and did not correspond even to the reality of the university world at the end of the last millennium. Teaching duties made the system stiffer and there was a desire to find other ways of determining the annual working time of those with teaching responsibilities.
A specific collective agreement was therefore drawn up to improve the conditions for research-based teaching, which aimed, among other things, to increase flexibility in working time arrangements, improve research conditions and develop new, more stimulating forms of teaching and learning. In the same context, it was agreed that teachers’ working time would be 1600 hours per year and that this would be monitored on the basis of performance and results, rather than on the basis of time or period.
So, for 27 years, the University of Helsinki has also been following an agreement not to monitor working time on the basis of time or periods of time. Now, however, as a member of the FEE board, Lindblom seems to want to return to the old days by writing about the monitoring of working hours contrary to the collective agreement. This is a very significant comment that goes against the very rationale of the whole working time agreement. If this is also FEE’s position in the collective agreement negotiations, we can expect very difficult negotiations.
Employers are responsible for occupational safety – including for staff under the total working time system. Under the collective agreement, annual working time in the total working time system is 1,612 hours. The universities’ reporting and allocation systems prevent the recording/reporting of actual working hours.
At present, teaching hour caps are the only mechanism protecting staff under the total working time system. However, they alone are insufficient for ensuring reasonable workloads and supporting well-being at work. The system should better recognize workloads, ensure staff have enough time off for rest and relaxation, and ensure annual leave is taken as intended in the system.
In the article, Lindblom attacks not only the monitoring of working time but also contact teaching hours. In principle, the good thing about the article is that the Rector of the University of Helsinki recognises that teachers’ jobs have become more varied and that teaching is no longer just done in front of a lecture hall talking to students. But as a solution, the idea of removing the contact teaching cap is very problematic. This would allow more contact teaching to be assigned to the teacher.
It is important to note that the contact teaching hour cap is not the same thing as the teaching obligation that existed in the 1990s. Removing the contact teaching cap does not guarantee that people in teaching focused roles will be able to carry out research, but risks removing the opportunity for more teachers to carry out research.
Unfortunately, Lindblom’s speech cannot be regarded as an ill-considered throwaway, as it has been published on the FEE website at a time when collective bargaining is under way in universities. FEE’s bargaining objectives throughout the entire period of privatised universities have been miserable for the employees. For example, when, at the time of the state universities, universities were still obliged under collective agreements to carry out regular periodic reviews of fixed-term contracts in conjunction with university shop stewards, this was one of the first things FEE wanted to remove from collective agreements. This showed the degree of FEE’s commitment to solving the problem of fixed-term contracts which has also been visible later.
It should also be remembered that, when negotiating the first collective agreement after the reform of the Universities Act, FEE wanted to increase the contact teaching hour caps for university teaching and research staff by as much as 33%. This was based on the fact that the negotiators claimed that an hour meant 60 minutes, whereas under the universities’ established course practice it meant 45 minutes. With this background, the position taken by the FEE board member is problematic and shows a great willingness to further undermine the position of university employees.
Antero Puhakka
The author is a long-standing trade union activist who has been a shop steward and chief shop steward for 24 years. Puhakka has also served as chairman of the Union of Research Professionals during the reform of the university pay system.
Read more about the background to full-time work in the Acatiimi’s article (in Finnish): Miten päädyimme kokonaistyöaikaan?
This blog post is translated with DeepL.
