UCU: Increased workload and stress

Motion

Motion text: Conference deplores the crisis in higher education funding, which is leading to cuts and threats of cuts in funding to institutions across the country.
Conference notes that the pressures to improve both recruitment and retention without increasing staff numbers, and in some cases even reducing staff numbers through redundancies, have led to poor morale and heavy workloads for many academic and academic-related staff and have had an impact on the services we provide to students. This situation has led to an increase in the already high levels of stress, with many colleagues suffering from long-term stress-related illnesses and disabilities or even leaving university employment, thus creating ever higher workloads and levels of stress for those remaining.
Conference instructs UCU to make workload and stress a focus of its campaign to defend higher education funding and in its negotiations with individual institutions and UCEA.