You are your own best trustee

Eventually, white smoke is emitted from the negotiations and life settles back to its usual rhythm. Union and occupational health and safety representatives offer support when problems arise, but who is actually the best trustee of a university worker?

That would be you yourself. Your manager, colleague, union rep or trustee can only provide limited support unless you take action for your own benefit. The most important products you sell to your employer in exchange for wages are your working hours and your expertise.

It is difficult to track whether the annual 1,612 working hours are met, which is why I strongly encourage you to monitor your own working hours, what tasks that time is spent on, and how it matches your work plan. Long gone are the days of “teaching obligations” and chronological time spent behind a lectern being the norm. That has been replaced by an assortment of tasks not automatically slotting into any obvious niche or even being directly reflected by the work plan.

Creating a work plan and reviewing it as the job description changes is in the interest of any teacher or researcher. In this light, it is crucial for you yourself to know what your working hours are spent on. Expertise is another essential part of the package a university worker brings with them. Monitoring this is equally important to tracking your working hours.

However, delivering expertise for consideration is hardly unlimited, and not everything done under an employment contract belongs to the employer. That is why protecting one’s copyright is also relevant to every university worker’s interests. In this respect, everyone is not only their own trustee, but also their colleagues.

The distribution of teaching and research resources should always be done voluntarily, and appeals to collegiality or historical practices cannot be reason enough to demand making something available for public use

Santeri Palviainen

Chair, The Union for University Teachers and Researchers in Finland (YLL)