Lex Academic®

In academic fields where competition is tough and resources are scarce, it is common for people to perform work for little or no remuneration, hoping that this will lead to better opportunities for further employment, promotion or recognition. This sort of work can be described as ‘hope labour’. David Brax, adviser at the Swedish Secretariat for Gender Research, reasons here about hope in academic work as an important driving force but also warns about it as a potential source of exploitation.

The term ‘hope labour’ has been coined in recent years to capture a type of work that is performed without or with insufficient remuneration in the hope that it will lead to better work conditions at some point down the line. The term seems to have first been used to describe typical conditions for workers in the culture and heritage sector, but it has recently gained some traction in relation to academia.

As a young university lecturer, you are very likely to spend much more time preparing for teaching than what you actually get paid for. You do this because you want to do a good job and provide your students with the best you are capable of. But you also do it because you want to show that you’re someone the department can count on to deliver, and you hope that good results and flattering course evaluations will get you more teaching assignments in the future. Given the low success rate from the major research funders, most grant applications can probably also be sorted under the same heading. Hope labour is often done quietly or secretly because the impression you want to give is that what you deliver reflects your natural capacity – this is just how good you are, and you want to hide the fact that the effort and the hours it actually took to perform it is unsustainable in the long run. This ‘furtive workaholism‘, to use Louise Chapman’s terminology, leads to burnout and deep vocational dissatisfaction.

The concept of ‘hope labour’ is useful as a rudimentary diagnostic tool; for us as individual employees, it can help us to get a clear view of our work situation. At an organisational level, it can help universities to raise awareness of the hidden mechanisms that create risks of overload, burnout and prolonged sick leave.

It is especially important to keep track of hope-driven work in organisations where many have temporary or otherwise precarious forms of employment, and where valuable workers can disappear from the system without this being noticed as a problem. If the work situation for a large part of the workforce is strained, this also creates system-wide risks – a system that relies on unpaid extra work, besides being ethically dubious, is also highly vulnerable.

A cynical interpretation is that hope labour is a deliberate, or possibly unintentional, arrangement that makes it relatively easy for employers to get rid of people without having to fire them, or that makes people deliver more than they would get done under normal, paid, working hours. It is easier to deny responsibility for the negative consequences of this extra work when that work was never clearly stated as an actual requirement.

Now, hope is fundamentally a positive emotion and there are definitely worse driving forces in academia. But hope is fundamentally related to uncertainty. The existence of hope labour is also intimately related to the notion of academic work as a calling, as something that we would perform even if we were not being paid to do it. That our research is often motivated by a genuine personal interest is probably also why we continue to hope for an academic career, despite setbacks and indications that we do not have what it takes to survive, let alone thrive, in academia.

Hope labour is thus a problem for a number of reasons, which I’ll outline below.

Hope labour can lead to exploitation

People working overtime is not a major problem if they genuinely want to work overtime. The problem arises when academic institutions rely on unpaid labour to function at all. This is a particular risk in subject areas with fewer resources, such as the humanities and the social sciences.

Hope might never be fulfilled

If the hope for better conditions is never fulfilled, it is carried out completely without compensation and should be recognised for what it is: a form of exploitation. The risk of this is high if and when the allocation of course responsibilities, research time, etc., happens in non-transparent ways and people cannot make an informed judgement regarding their chances for future success.

The distribution of labour can be skewed

Who can really afford to live on hope? Being able to work more than you are paid for is not an option for everyone (e.g. for those who need a secondary income or who have caring responsibilities). To the extent that hope labour is carried out to gain advantages in a competitive situation, this means that there is a risk of systematic skewed distribution in academic work, which affects the experiences and perspectives that are represented in academia.

In recent years, a literary genre that goes by the name of ‘quit lit’ has emerged. Texts in this genre typically describe experiences of how working conditions within the academy force people to leave a job that they have loved. For many, the early academic career seems like a race where the goal is to reach a permanent position before burning out. Socially, this is unsustainable. Economically, it is problematic that researchers and teachers work on the verge of burnout, consequently leaving important research undone and valuable teaching capabilities lost. If universities operate at all on the basis of free labour, this must be considered a system failure. But what incentives do the universities and the state that finances them have to counteract hope labour? If higher education institutions function because of this work, and the employees justify their work efforts in the hope of better conditions, who will take responsibility for critically examining its sustainability?

David Brax holds a PhD in practical philosophy and works as Senior Investigator at the Swedish Secretariat for Gender Research. He has a background in metaethics and philosophy of law. His current work includes a report on researchers and university teachers being victims of threats and harassment.