Fair and healthy work-life balance

  • All staff should have reasonable permanent work-from-home rights

  • No expectation that staff be responsive to work requests outside normal hours, in weekends or when on leave (a right to disconnect)

  • Ordinary hours for professional staff to be no more than 36.75 hours per week during the span 8.00am to 6.00pm Monday to Friday

  • Protections against excessive or uncompensated overtime

  • Effective hours-linked caps on academic workload

 

The Covid pandemic has shown us that it’s possible for many of us for work from home at least some of the time. It’s also shown that for many of us, that is preferable.

While we definitely still value office time for collaboration and community building, working from home a couple of days a week helps our work/life balance. We save wasted time and money commuting and can get a few chores done in break times, freeing up evenings and weekends for recreation and family time.

A healthy work/life balance requires more than just work-from-home provisions. We need to stop our work seeping into our personal and family time. We need the right to disconnect from work outside work time.