University unions that represent both faculty and administrators pretty quickly get owned by the administrators, who outnumber us substantially. Administrators can take annual leave. I'm not sure that annual leave ever really exists for academics. It's pretty much impossible not to be turning over problems in your head, constantly, whether you're at the desk or whether you're sitting pool-side. Unless you're in the bench sciences where you're tied to a lab bench, you can work from anywhere that has a reasonable internet connection - and even that can be optional for some kinds of work.
Tenure and promotion are tournament games. If you take your allowed annual leave seriously and somebody else doesn't, you're down a rung for tenure or promotion. If there's downsizing pressure, taking leave puts you a rung closer to the chopping block and a step farther away from being able to get hired elsewhere.
The bargain seems to be that annual leave doesn't really exist* but nobody really takes attendance either. So if you need to stay home with a sick kid or whatever, it's pretty easy (so long as you're not on deck to lecture that day). A couple weeks on the beach as proper leave? Well, you can do it. As much as you want. It's totally up to you.
* ...although we all have to fill in forms claiming that we took 5 weeks' leave and indicating the days nominally taken so that untaken leave can't accrue on the books as a liability. The strong hint is that anybody making a fuss about it will cause the whole place to start putting in time clocks.
It's a bad time in history for your labor to be replaceable. We engineers have the same pressures (sure, take your vacations, but don't even think about slipping that deadline).
ReplyDeleteWow, I'm very sure not getting your four weeks leave, and "documenting you are" is against that law. To avoid moral hazard. That's crazy and crazier that your blogging about it, with no regard for this possibility.
ReplyDeleteOur workplace has pressure to work, but we also have shutdown over Christmas that chews up a couple weeks of the four. And the US operations has a few extra weeks of "shutdown" thus there is never any accumulation, it's pretty much taken in mass.
It's utterly unenforceable though. Your employer could force you to be at home if they wanted. But where promotion and "not being downsized" is a tournament game, and where they can't force people to not work when they are at work, the game runs.
ReplyDeleteAgreed, but then you should be able to accumulate leave, but that's also a game metric, so I see why you would sign the leave away.
ReplyDeleteBut it's still seems a little "broken".
Accumulating would requiring proving that you hadn't taken that leave, which would at least require the time clocks or taking attendance. And then the University would force you to take the leave, or at least to not be at your office. And if you're at home, it's not like they can stop your working there either.
ReplyDeleteAnd then there's the more probable stupid HR response: running an attendance sheet, requiring that everyone be in his or her office for all but the 5 weeks of leave, and docking your pay if work from home a couple days a week.
Colleague ran the same "yeah, I'll tick random days for you" drill, then got hassles from an HR administrator about having taken too much leave because while he'd taken de facto far less than the 5 weeks, he'd ticked too many boxes by mistake and they wanted to dock his pay!
"proving", "time clocks" I was starting to feel big brother, but then you did mention union's, and with union's you tend to have active enforcement of "the rules". Sigh the height of intellectual achievement, and trust is not to been seen.
ReplyDeleteWith all that taken into account, maybe the just "take" the five weeks and chasing the promoting is the best strategy.
The closet unionist in me couldn't help but make me pass comment here. It seems to me that what is really broken about this is the attitude from management that if you take the leave you are entitled to that you are somehow not as committed to your workplace as someone who chooses to not take leave. To penalise someone's career for taking a bit of time off seems monumentally harsh, especially when the employer has agreed that such leave is permissible under the terms of their employment contract. I can fully understand the preference for scheduling leave around times when it is less disruptive and/or more convenient for the employer, but to tacitly deny leave like this seems a tad draconian. I'm sure there are other metrics being measured with regard to work performance and quality other than just the amount of leave you take, and that this is only of minor consideration, but it still smells a bit to me.
ReplyDeleteNope, that's not right. Management would strictly prefer that everyone take their entitled leave. It's not a "workers vs management" game. It's a "worker vs worker" game where output is observable but inputs aren't and where those of us who are less productive can compensate (to avoid punishment) by forgoing leave.
ReplyDeleteThat sounds like you are suggesting that your fellow workers determine whether you gain tenure or get promoted. Is that really the case? Don't you have departmental management who decide this sort of thing?
ReplyDeleteDoh, ignore my last comment. After a closer read of your reply I kind of get it; who'd have thought academia was such a dog-eat-dog world... I wonder if there are ever cases where someone desperate for tenure misrepresents one of their peer's leave to make them look less efficient?
ReplyDeletePromotion is by committees of fellow academics, but that isn't the problem either. Imagine you're the manager deciding who to fire or who to promote. You're given two vitae listing employees' journal and other research output, their teaching evaluations, and their administrative service. They're both stellar. But Candidate A presents that vita because he's just great; Candidate B presents that vita because he skipped every holiday to be able to push out that much work. You cannot tell the difference because you don't know how much each person worked at home while "on leave".
ReplyDeleteNow suppose you're Candidate A. You'll then work just a little bit harder so that you do better than B so you're the one who gets promoted / isn't fired.
Run that game over lots of people and you wind up with a rank order that matches generalised ability, but with nobody taking leave.
Phew, yet another good reason why I'm glad I didn't pursue a career as an academic. If I'd stuck at my studies and gone on to do a PhD I too could be skipping my leave :)
ReplyDeleteIt's not dog-eat-dog in the knifing each other sense. No way I'd have stayed if it were. But redundancy rounds sharpen incentives about not being last.
ReplyDeleteA nice illustration of the enforcement problem came with the US government shutdown, where NSF, NASA, NIH, etc were actually required to make sure their personnel were not working, because working would have been illegal: doing science could get you prosecuted.
ReplyDeleteThere was, as you may remember, fuss.