Standard Workload Forms & Overtime – How Much is Your Time Worth?

The Full-time Faculty workload has an upper limit of 44 hours per week. Over 44 hours is considered overtime. Even with overtime, more than 47 hours per week is in violation of Canadian labour laws.

Accepting overtime on your Standard Workload form (SWF) is voluntary. You do not have to accept it.

Before you accept overtime on your SWF, you might want to consider a few things, not least of which is how much you think your time is worth.

For the sake of keeping the math simple, let’s say your salary is $100,000 per year. If you sign a SWF with 44.5 hours per week (teaching 215 students, say), you would earn $785 for a 14-week semester.

This would mean an extra $53 per week on your paycheque, before taxes and other deductions. But this is true only if all of your students stay registered in your courses.

If you lose 10 students before week 10 of the semester, this is noted at SWF audit and your SWF is recalculated — and you get no overtime pay.

If you lose 10 (out of 215) students by the two-thirds mark of the semester, has your workload indeed been reduced? Probably not. But you won’t be getting any overtime pay.