Dogwalking short of strike
The week has 168 hours. Subtracting for each day around twelve hours for sleeping, eating, and other essential parts of life, plus a daily commute, leaves around 80 hours. Over a full year, that’s around 4000 hours that are available. According to my employer’s workload guidance, I am getting paid for approximately 1650 hours of work per year. Adding a few weeks of paid time off, this number increases to something around 1800 hours. It is the remaining 2200 hours that create an issue. Employers are more than happy to take a large chunk of these hours, without pay, and fill them with tasks. This is the workload problem in Higher Education, one of UCU’s Four Fights.
Nominally I should spend 40% of my working on teaching, 40% on research, and 20% on service to the university. In reality, my job does not fit into the 36 or 37 hours per week that I nominally get paid for. Since teaching can’t be postponed, research is typically the part that gets pushed out. Research means thinking and analysing and writing, but it also means basic scholarship: Regular reading, going to colloquia, seminars, occasionally a conference, meetings with collaborators, staying up to date, peer-review — all that takes maybe five, ten hours every week, if done properly. I like doing all these things, and therefore it does not seem weird to me to do them in my spare time. I used to be quite happy to do that. But it’s still unpaid work, and it’s work my employer benefits from. It’s exploitation, no matter how good I feel about it.
The workload problem is not my personal issue, it’s not a matter of being lazy, and it’s not lack of motivation. It’s a systemic problem that creates inequality and unfair working conditions. It means that you can only have my job, or any other similar job, if these spare hours are still available. That means, in turn, that it is very hard to keep this job if you happen to have a disability or a chronic illness. It makes it very difficult to raise children, to volunteer for a charity, or, you know. To have a dog.
I always wanted to have a dog. But I always struggled to see how a dog could fit into my working life, with all the hectic, the travel, the instability. Dogs need a minimum of routine, some exercise, and a stable social life, and I couldn’t offer that. So, I didn’t get a dog. Then something happened. During the strike in 2018, priorities and alliances got re-aligned, for many of us. Someone, I don’t remember who it was, expressed this one simple test for your work-life balance: If you can’t have a dog, then something is wrong with your job. It was the first time I had heard this. And it was the first time I really thought that, indeed, something is wrong with my job. The first time I realised that working ten, twenty, thirty hours every week for an employer without getting paid for it, is wrong. It was a turning point.
The person who gave me that bit of important advice probably had a normal dog in mind, a dog that is okay with an hour of leisurely walking every day, a dog who happily runs after a ball for a while and then sleeps again for hours. They probably didn’t think of a giant sled dog. The dog I actually got is Bunny, an Alaskan Malamute, fully grown up when he came to me, but untrained, unsocialised, unprepared for life, and with a seemingly unlimited supply of energy. He came to me in April 2020, during the first pandemic lockdown in the UK. The pandemic gave more control over my working hours than I ever had before. The pandemic also bought me some time to figure out how to combine the dog and the job. How to solve my personal workload problem.
Here is the deal: At the bare minimum, Bunny needs a couple of hours of activity, every day. That’s usually two hour-long excursions, plus two shorter walks for bodily functions and social media, or, as Bunny knows it, sniffing and peeing. Walking is not enough for this type of dog. They need speed, action, and engagement, a lot of it. Moreover, my dog needs a great deal of attention to keep him from chasing or straying or scavenging. As a result, these two hours of dog walking are really good exercise, not just for the dog. It’s definitely not a relaxing break from work. And I almost certainly can’t use them to rehearse arguments, talks, or lectures in my head. Those type of walks should count as work anyway.
Two hours is the bare minimum. On most days, we spend three hours outside, plus another hour or two with feeding, brushing, playing, training or just hanging out. More on weekends. That’s 1800 hours a year, almost the entire block that I used to call spare time. Moreso, the dog is always there. He does not disappear when work piles up. While he is happy to wait for a few hours when I’m working, at some point he is going to ask for my attention and my time, and rightfully so. And he is the kind of person who is impossible to ignore. Even more so, I really like spending time with him. It’s never a chore to go for a walk, or to go for training with him. Put all of this together, and it’s the solution to my personal workload problem.
Since spring 2020, I have not worked more than forty hours in a week. I have not spend more than five hours continuously, without any break, at my job. I do work on weekends, sometimes, and also on evenings, a couple of hours here and there. Those hours buy me longer lunch breaks during the week, for example, when the weather is nice. The lunch break is the time for the first long dog walk of the day.
It is predictable what happened to my job: I am trying to be as efficient as I can with teaching and service. I minimize tasks that are really not necessary. I prioritize students over everything else. And I stop doing research during teaching time, that means, for most of the year. Essentially, I’ve decided to exchange research with dog walks. It’s not my favourite solution to the workload problem, but it’s better than giving in to it.
In autumn 2021 UCU called for ‘Action Short of Strike’, that means, to work according to contract. That this is seen as ‘industrial action’ is in itself a demonstration of our workload problem. In most other sectors, Action Short of Strike would be considered to be just doing your job. Here it causes disruption to ‘just’ do your job. In any case, when UCU called for ASOS, I was ready. I have been on ASOS since Bunny came into my house, and I will be on ASOS until he leaves, or until I retire, whichever comes first. Industrial action through walking my dog, that’s the new normal for me.
