In Our Own Time: Precarious and Unpaid Work(loads) in Academia
During a local UCU workload campaign amid ongoing budget cuts and threats of compulsory redundancies, we ask: where does casualisation sit in this? How can we understand workload through job insecurity? What about the hidden or silent redundancies of staff in hourly or/and fixed-term contracts, so normalised in neoliberal academia that they are invisible?
By Cecile Menard, UCUE Anticasualisation Officer, and Lena Wånggren, Local Contact in LLC
Image: "Unpaid labour in academia or when your 'own time' is recovery time". Sketch by Maria Stoian
Cecile and Lena, UCU reps and casualised colleagues at the University of Edinburgh, give their views and share insights from their current project on intersectional inequalities and unpaid invisibilised labour in academia.
Casualisation: the Precarisation of Work and Life
Casualisation – the precarisation of work, in which core business previously done by colleagues on open-ended contracts is done on hourly, fixed-term, sessional, and one-off basis – is a key feature of the contemporary academic workplace. Alongside neoliberal performance measures, increases in student fees, cuts in government funding, managerial growth, drive for external funding for core business, and wider principles of commodification, competition and perpetual restructuring, the worsening of working conditions include both untenable workloads and the precarisation of work. Crucially, precarity does not concern only our working lives; the insecurity it brings spreads into all areas of life and hinders health, family planning, life choices, and living situation.
UCU Queen's University Belfast picket lines 2023. Photo by Livi Dee
While a generation ago many colleagues considered a period of casualisation a ‘rite of passage’ or a necessary career ‘stage’, in 2025 job insecurity is the norm, and a form of working condition rather than a ‘stage’ in an academic career (Menard and Shinton 2022; Bonello and Wånggren 2023). The scale of casualisation is unacceptable, and larger than in most other sectors: across UK institutions, 74 percent of teaching staff are on hourly or fixed-term contracts, while 65 percent of research-only and 13 percent of Academic-related professional staff are on fixed-term contracts. Still, these numbers are underestimated because more staff are on so-called open-ended contracts with a ‘review’ or ‘at risk’ date, contracts that are, in all but name, also fixed-term (UCU 2023). In addition, there are over 62k ‘atypical’ casualised workers (UCU 2025). In the latest available Higher Education Statistical Agency (HESA) data, around half of University of Edinburgh staff (49.2 percent) are employed on fixed term contracts (HESA 2025) – a figure that does not include the ‘open-ended with review date’ category, nor one-off payments, and is thus in practice much higher.
Importantly, casualisation does not hit equally: statistics show that people of colour and women workers, especially intersectionally marginalised individuals, are more likely to be employed on insecure contracts in higher education (UCU 2025). In addition, intersectionally marginalised individuals experience precarity more acutely (O’Keefe and Courtois 2019; Myers 2022; Evans et al. 2024). For instance, Asian women are nearly twice as likely as white men to be employed on fixed-term contracts, with almost half of Asian women in such roles compared to just over a quarter of white men. Black academics, meanwhile, are disproportionately represented in the most exploitative contracts, that is zero-hour and hourly contracts (UCU 2020). In the most recent HESA statistics, we see racialised patterns: for academic hourly paid staff, 25 percent are Black workers, while 14 percent are White workers, 15 percent Asian and 17 percent ‘Other’ (including mixed) workers (UCU 2025). Casualisation is clearly an equalities issue, as much as it is a wider issue of job security.
Casualisation and Workload
What is workload? It is a term often used to describe the amount of work we do in our employment, combined with a calculation by piece (as in number of essays, or a research paper) and/or by time frame (as in a two hour class, or one hour worked at the helpdesk). A UCU survey reported that 74% of academic staff found their workload unmanageable (UCU, 2023); indeed on average academics work at least two days a week unpaid (UCU, 2022). Locally, there is currently a staff survey open at the University of Edinburgh; the previous staff surveys (2018, 2020, 2023) highlighted workload as a key issue, and workload is likely to be a key concern also in the current one.
With the ongoing budget cuts and recruitment ‘restraints’, many casualised academics are on the frontline. Hourly-paid staff are having their hours slashed, some fixed-term contracts are not being renewed despite prior assurances and some previously open-ended positions are now being filled by fixed-term ones (or not filled at all) as a form of future-proofing. These cuts or hidden/silent redundancies leave many colleagues with no or too few contracted hours and not enough money to live on, including paying rent and/or bills. For these casualised colleagues, the problem is thus not that they have too much (paid) work, it is that they have too little (importantly, paid work – many casualised staff, like non-casualised staff, do days per week unpaid).
For PhD students who rely on paid employment rather than on a stipend for their livelihood, this means taking on part-time work – often after a full day of study – in other institutions or outside of academia to make ends meet (Crockford et al. 2015; Woolston 2019; Evans et al. 2021). Casualised academics in part-time employment face an equally challenging reality, frequently juggling multiple jobs both within and outside academia to survive. If within academia, these roles are often spread across multiple departments or universities. Casualised academics often navigate conflicting demands from multiple line managers and institutional expectations, while balancing their workload and duties across several roles, and simultaneously working many hours unpaid – in their own time – for example writing job and grant applications, to maintain their careers.
In Their Own Time: Visibilising Structures of Inequality at Work
In our EDICa-funded co-participatory project (in partnership with UCU Edinburgh) In Their Own Time: challenging conventional funding structures to include intersectionally underrepresented casualised academics, we focus on the invisibilised and unpaid work expected by intersectionally marginalised long-term casualised academics: the hoops of research funding, the lack of institutional support, the intrinsic ableism of neoliberal academia, and exclusionary processes. We examine how the expectations noted above of unpaid labour are particularly discriminatory towards those with caring responsibilities, whose ‘own time’ is ‘other people’s time’ and/or disabled individuals whose ‘own time’ is often ‘recovery time’. The normalisation of such exploitative expectations creates a system where success is skewed in favour of those who can work beyond their paid hours. Such expectations means that academia becomes, or rather remains, a place of inequality where only the privileged few can afford to stay.
While marketisation and the speeding up of academic work harms colleagues across contract types and positionalities, as one participant states in Bonello and Wånggren (2023): ‘the shit keeps rolling down the hill’. Precarity compounds the intersectional inequalities and challenges at work and in the home. Disability, Gender and Queer Studies scholars, alongside social movements, have long noted the normative and inequal structures of society’s valuing of work, through concepts such as reproductive labour, ‘crip time’ and ‘queer time’. Being precariously employed means always being on the lookout for the next job, effectively turning job hunting into a part-time unpaid job on top of the paid one. With permanent academic positions being scarce, this cycle often leads to further precarious roles, trapping individuals – most often women (O’Keefe and Courtois 2019; UCU 2025) – in ongoing instability. For migrant academics dependent on an employer VISA to remain in the country, precarity is further intensified.
As workers who, between the two of us, have been precariously employed for 27 years and wrote the project proposal unpaid and in our own time, we call on employers and funders to address fully the methodological and political concerns arising with workload, job insecurity and other forms of precarity, critically questioning the ways in which – from a material and methodological standpoint – we do academic work. Determined not to reproduce the systems of oppression that we oppose, our project ensures that participants and researchers are paid the same rate, that participant agency is enabled in decisions over time, space and narrative, and that their voices are amplified through collaboration with an illustrator to maximise visibility and dissemination. Through our project, we shine a light on the unpaid invisibilised work demanded of us In Our Own Time, making visible the ableist, ageist, racist and sexist structures and harms of the neoliberal university, and demand change.
Conclusion: Two sides of the Same Coin
Crucially, workload – considered from a perspective of intersectional inequalities and job security – is not an issue separate from that of casualisation: they are two sides of the same coin. With cuts leading to deliberate understaffing, non-casualised academics are forever overworked, while casualised workers are used as a band-aid to prop up the shortfall.
It is high time that we all, students and workers together at this university, say: We demand secure jobs and workable workloads, a healthy and thriving workplace, where democratic decisions are respected, and student and staff are allowed to hold senior management to account for mismanagement. Only then can we – casualised and non-casualised colleagues alike – do our best work.
References
Bonello, M., and Wånggren, L. 2023. Working Conditions in a Marketised University System: Generation Precarity. Palgrave Macmillan.
Crockford, J., R. Hordósy, and KS Simms. 2015. I really needed a job, like, for money and stuff: student finance, part-time work and the student experience at a northern red-brick university. Widening Participation and Lifelong Learning 17(3): 89–109.
Evans, C., and Z. N. Yusof. 2021. The importance of part-time work to UK university students. Industry and Higher Education 35(6): 725-735.
Evans, B., A. Allam, A. Bê, C. Hale, M. Rose, and A. Ruddock. 2024. Being left behind beyond recovery: ‘crip time’ and chronic illness in neoliberal academia. Social & Cultural Geography, Ahead-of-print: 1–21.
Higher Education Statistical Agency. 2025. Data and Analysis: Employment Conditions. https://www.hesa.ac.uk/data-and-analysis/staff/employment-conditions. Accessed 17/2/2025.
Menard, C. B. and S. Shinton. 2022. The career paths of researchers in long-term employment on short-term contracts: Case study from a UK university. PLoS ONE 17(9): e0274486.
Myers, M. 2022. Racism, zero-hours contracts and complicity in higher education. British Journal of Sociology of Education 43(4): 584–602.
O’Keefe, T. and A. Courtois, 2019. ‘Not one of the family’: Gender and precarious work in the neoliberal university. Gender, Work and Organization 26(4): 463–479.
UCU. 2020. Precarious work in higher education Insecure contracts and how they have changed over time. https://www.ucu.org.uk/media/10899/Precarious-work-in-higher-education-May-20/pdf/ucu_he-precarity-report_may20.pdf. Accessed 17/2/2025.
UCU. 2022. Workload survey 2021 Data report. https://www.ucu.org.uk/media/12905/UCU-workload-survey-2021-data-report/pdf/WorkloadReportJune22.pdf. Accessed 17/2/2025.
UCU. 2023. Workload survey 2021/22 Higher Education. https://www.ucu.org.uk/media/14644/UCU-workload-survey-2021-HE-report/pdf/UCU_Workload_Survey_HE_May24.pdf. Accessed 17/2/2025.
UCU. 2025. Precarious work in higher education – update February 2025 (HESA staff data 2022/23), https://www.ucu.org.uk/media/14814/Precarious-work-in-higher-education---update-February-2025/pdf/HESA_-_Precarious_work_in_HE_22-23_-_Feb_2025.pdf. Accessed 17/2/2025.
Woolston, C. 2019. Nature 575: 403–406.
