Labour’s ‘right to switch off’ is ‘unfeasible’ in UK academia

The new Labour government’s plan to introduce a “right to switch off” could be “unfeasible” in UK academia, experts have warned.

Ahead of its general election victory, Labour promised to bring the UK in line with Ireland and Belgium by allowing workers to disconnect from their jobs outside regular hours, giving staff and employers the opportunity to “work together on bespoke workplace policies or contractual terms that benefit both parties”.

But questions have been raised about how applicable the rules could be in academia, which has been long associated with a lack of formal working hours and an individual – and sometimes intense – pursuit of research goals.

This is complicated further by the financial crisis facing UK universities and the intense competition among researchers to secure permanent positions, research grants and other accolades.

“It’s hard to really see how feasible it is. There’s a massive problem with overworking in academia, but that problem certainly isn’t solved by right to disconnect,” said Ruth Dukes, professor of labour law at the University of Glasgow, adding that such regulation may even be “unwelcome”. 

Without addressing the root causes of high workloads, such regulations “make it even more difficult for people to do the work that they feel they have to do”, she added.

And it would be hard to enforce such rules, Professor Dukes said, with a code of best practice, as adopted in Ireland, the likeliest outcome.

Labour has also pledged to ban “exploitative” zero-hours contracts, leading to similar questions about how this could be applied within academia.

Deborah Dean, associate professor of industrial relations at the University of Warwick, said “disconnecting from work as a right is a really welcome signal in terms of employment relations in general”, but added that “most of us inevitably self-exploit by working on research in and around the increasing teaching and admin loads”.

“The problem is not with managers contacting us out of hours or a need to be ‘seen’ to be working. Instead, it is the relentless pressures to perform in narrowly specified ways that have been allowed to take over because of the pressures of marketisation. Not getting an evening email won’t change that,” she said.

Cathryn Knight, senior lecturer in the psychology of education at the University of Bristol, said intense competition to secure full-time positions in academia makes it even harder to enforce regulations on working conditions.

“Whether it’s possible to switch off from academia or whether people want to do that when there’s such pressure on them maintaining their jobs might be a difficult balance to get right,” she said.

juliette.rowsell@timeshighereducation.com