I was talking to someone recently about their experience as a non-unionized Teaching Assistant. The differences in work culture we found were staggering.

Since people don't usually TA at different places, I think most academics don't appreciate the magnitude of the differences.

(This is gonna be a thread but I must start with a big caveat: I'm a professor, not a TA, in my unionized workplace. Here I'm management, not labour. I hope/think I'm pretty labour-conscientious management, but you should for sure take my comparisons with that context in mind.)

So my friend is a TA at a non-unionized American university, and they said the official expectation is that a TA should be working TWENTY HOURS A WEEK. Half of a full-time job. How are you supposed to study if you're spending 4 hours every day grading/teaching?

I'm curious whether this is normal. TA's at non-unionized universities, what are the workload expectations or norms for a standard TAship?

My friend also said that TAs are routinely required to do more, sometimes significantly more, work than that 20 hours per week. Admin gives a survey after the course, asking whether they were overworked. But TAs typically lie and say they weren't.

This is of course exactly what one would predict—grad students setting up difficult & precarious plans for starting academic careers have a tremendous incentive not to be seen as causing trouble for professors in their departments. Of course they're not going to complain to admin

Then admin takes all these surveys at face value and says "good, everybody says they're being treated fairly, we don't need to do anything to ensure the instructors don't overwork their TAs"

My friend was shocked when I showed them an example of the kind of detailed TA agreement that UBC instructors are contractually obligated to set up with our TAs. "This would make a huge difference to our quality of life"

TAs at UBC are represented by CUPE 2278. https://cupe2278.ca/ 

Due to the TA collective agreement, instructors using TAs have a fixed number of hours they can ask their TAs to work. For a 1.0 TAship (the standard TA load), that's 192 hours over the term. (20 of those are for vacation and sick leave.) That's about 12 hours/week.

(Some TA hires are for more or less than that, as some students apply for more or less work, and some courses need more or less TA support. So one might be a 0.5 TA or a 1.5 TA — work, and pay, is adjusted proportionally.)

When I receive my TA allocation, I prepare a breakdown of how I propose to use the available hours of work. If I have 100 students and I guess each midterm will take 10 minutes to grade, I budget 17 hours to get that graded.

My friend asked: "does that hourly total include things like going to class?"

Of course it does! If I'm asking my TA's to attend the lectures, then doing so is part of their employment and they have to get paid for it!

Here's an example of the hourly breakdown from a course I taught that had two TAs, one 1.0 TA and one 0.5 TA. The middle columns are the hours for the two TAs.

UBC instructors are required to prepare written agreements like this at the start of each course with TAs

To be clear I am certainly not trying to suggest that exploitation of TAs doesn't happen at UBC. It absolutely does. My sense is that I am more conscientious than average about TA hours than my colleagues. I'm not sure, e.g., that everyone prepares these documents as is required.

And the issue about it being potentially dangerous to complain remains — but somewhat lessened, I think, by the unambiguous union regulations about what exactly would constitute over-working. When the violation is obvious, one sticks one's neck out less by flagging it.

One could also complain confidentially to the union; even if the specific circumstance isn't resolved appropriately, there's at least a record that there is a problem.

At any rate, the clearly established rules and expectations make exploitation less likely, and give a framework for redressing it when it does.

(I heard about one occasion where a UBC student was being overworked — something straightforwardly measurable in our system — the union mediated a discussion with the head and instructor, assignments were adjusted, and retroactive overtime pay was assigned.)

When I first arrived here and learned about these union rules, I thought it might be a little bit annoying or potentially adversarial, but I quickly discovered that it's really helpful to have clear guidelines about workload, and to be invited to plan specifically.

I would absolutely keep preparing documents like the one described above, even if not required to by a TA union.

It gives me comfort to have a very clear criterion regarding what is and is not a reasonable thing to ask of my TAs.

I'm curious about other academics' perspectives — TAs and instructors, unionized and nonunionized. I much only know UBC, only from the instructor side. (I actually barely ever TAd myself as a grad student.) What framework do you use to think about workload? Is overwork a problem?

I can say this much with confidence: TAing is labour that is very vulnerable to exploitation without labour protections, and TAs should probably almost always be unionized.

Also, if you are a prospective grad student considering where to study, quality of TA labour conditions would be a pretty good factor to try to learn something about. It will impact your life a lot.

Anyway that's the end of my thread, sorry if it was a little rambly, I tried organizing it like three different ways. Support workers, have a nice day