The problem with paying for excess workload

One of my unions’ current CBA has a new form of compensation for excess workload. This new language recognizes that faculty, counselors, librarians and coaches are performing unwaged labor “mentoring, advising, and outreach, to support underserved, first-generation, and/or underrepresented students” and provides temporary release time to do the work.

One of the 12 types of excessive workload covered in the CBA is “cultural taxation.” This is the extra labor performed by underrepresented faculty members of color whose workload increases supporting students who share their identity and study with them. These faculty are also more likely to do uncompensated extra work in institutional roles which becomes a “stealth workload escalator for faculty of color.”

Cultural taxation is not the only way that higher education faculty provide excess labor beyond what we are paid for. We are increasingly expected to not only teach (and do research for those on the tenure track) but also provide what administrators mean by their latest buzz word “equity in the classroom.” This translates into a range of services such as emotional and social support for students in crisis due to mental health, homelessness and poverty, to name a few. As a result of the branding of higher education to deliver more than teaching we are now expected to serve as educator, social worker, therapist, and even faux parent for no extra pay.

For those of us working in public institutions that predominately serve “underserved, first-generation, and/or underrepresented students,” this has become an impossible unpaid second job. Faculty in community colleges and public universities are now expected to correct generations, even centuries, of injustices, inequality and traumas that Michael Yates, in his recent book, “Work Work Work: Labor, Alienation, and Class Struggle,” calls the “hidden injuries of class” of our capitalist society.

We are now expected to not only solve all of the traumas of capitalism and systemic racism in a single semester-long class but are assessed and evaluated for our ability to do so. Whether or not we contingent faculty have a job is not based on our teaching but the impossible demand to deliver this “equity” to repair centuries of systemic oppression.

This is the modern equivalent of what the Wages for Housework movement called “unwaged labor” of caring for others. Among the types of work they focused on was cooking, cleaning, the raising of children and psychological and sexual services in the home.

If you work in the public sector or for a nonprofit, you are likely also doing additional unwaged care work. For some, it’s the expectation to smile, be friendly and welcoming, and nurture those you serve. The boss has drafted our clients and students to evaluate and rate the quality of our care work to ensure we follow orders. Too many thumbs down is a ticket to the unemployment line.

Focusing on flight attendants in her groundbreaking book, “The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling,” sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild showed how much of our work is being reorganized to sell unwaged “emotional” labor.

There’s a problem with paying extra for excess workload due to unwaged care work. It hides the fact that all waged labor hides immense amounts of unwaged labor. Capitalism is based on paying a worker less than the value of what they produce. This is what Karl Marx meant by “surplus value.”

There is a huge amount of unwaged work required to ready a waged worker to sell their labor. That labor, according to a recent estimate, is worth $133,000 a year. That is the equivalent of two times the median household income in the US.

Most of this work is still done by women around the world. According to The New York Times, this unwaged work is valued at nearly $11 trillion or one-eighth of global output of goods and services. 

The women most likely to do this care work for pay are women of color, many of whom are immigrants. This is a big part of the reason why Black and Latina women are paid between 13 to 22 cents less per hour than white women. 

Because unwaged labor is hidden in all profits, paying more for “excess workload” is a bonus for doing even more work than you are paid for. We should instead be demanding more pay for the same work rather than allowing the boss to pay their favorites for extra work.

Pay for excess workload is a covert divide and conquer strategy. These special “wage productivity” deals allow the boss to turn workers against one another and undermine solidarity. Those who get the extra pay then raise the expectations for how hard everyone else is expected to work — without extra pay. 

By limiting the extra pay available, it also forces workers to compete against one another for temporary relief. Our CBA only provides the equivalent of about 300 classes distributed among 29,000 unit members in a 23-campus system with 460,000 students. The temporary token amount of compensation will not change an unjust system.

These bonuses are more likely to make doing even more unwaged emotional labor part of our job. This is a classic example of the “speed up.” Instead of a few scarce bonuses we should demand the boss reduce everyone’s workload, redefine jobs that do care work and provide necessary training to do it, hire more diverse workers, and pay all of us more.

To do that we need stronger unions that can enforce the contract and stop speed-ups, not promote them in our contracts. 

Robert Ovetz is editor of "Workers' Inquiry and Global Class Struggle," co-editor of the forthcoming "Real World Labor (Vol. 4)" and the author of "When Workers Shot Back" and "We the Elites: Why the US Constitution Serves the Few." Follow him at @OvetzRobert