Worried about redundancy? Talk to ‘woebot’!

We have long understood the university’s approach to wellbeing of staff as a neoliberal obfuscation, a way of avoiding addressing the systemic causes of stress (overwork, casualisation, contradictory institutional demands and so on), whilst burnishing the institution’s reputation of being a kind and considerate employer. Knitting and cups of tea seem to be the preferred models of care offered by the university.

Many of these wellbeing ‘resources’ are ostensibly innocuous; what’s wrong with encouragement to keep bodily active? And from time to time, we all need to talk through the emotions generated by the complexities of life. The resources offered by the university are mostly lifestyle tips, safety valves for anxiety, or signposts for those genuinely in need of specialist advice or services. There is the odd sinister suggestion; laying out your mental health situation for your line manager will sit on your record – in your best interests. And when will the university learn about barriers to accessibility and ableism in its gym-obsessed, monolingual approach to mental health?

Even in times of whatever passes for normal in HE institutions, these resources are a patchwork of mental health and wellbeing ‘tools’ designed to encourage a neoliberal, late-capitalist idea of resilience (nothing to do with healthy hardiness) to make those who labour, labour harder and with less complaint. These resources do not address the systemic, institutional, unsustainable, and contradictory demands that are the real sources of workplace stress.

Iron fist in a velvet glove

It is, then, egregious that wellbeing is used as the velvet glove to clothe the iron fist of university management’s determination to shatter the lives of people it claims to care about. Signposting those ‘pooled’ for compulsory redundancy towards wellbeing ‘resources’ is inappropriate and absurd to the point of parody.

The missives from the VC trailing the intention to chop away at people’s livelihoods also pointed us (because we might be upset by this) towards the wellbeing pages on the intranet. Then, as the ‘consultation’ period began, senior management continued the wellbeing leitmotif, offering support to staff during these difficult times. A message of support from the VC is also included in a BBC article, reporting the distress of staff who feel targeted in the redundancy process – we would like to ask exactly what sort of support the VC means here. This support discourse is cognitive dissonance par excellence, and it illuminates how senior management leverage wellbeing discourses to obfuscate the institutional violence taking place.

If you are facing redundancy, angry about the clumsiness of communications and their targeted nature or stressed about the inevitable increase in workloads after losing colleagues, you could try going to the gym, talking to a ‘wellbeing champion’, or take an individual stress assessment questionnaire. We are offered ‘woebot’ to ‘tackle’ grief and financial problems. You can pour your problems into the AI void and let it ‘track’ your moods – but it cannot find you your next job. If the ‘woebot’ (which mercifully doesn’t seem to exist) can’t help with the impending loss of your income, you could try doing a Wellbeing Plan.

Bread and circuses

What all this tells us is the last thing management wants is a collective and public display of anger and resistance.

The university has form; in previous rounds of redundancies and cuts (which are now looking like normalised management tools rather than last resort actions) staff were invited to enjoy a bouncy castle and a free ice cream as mood boosters, literally whilst HR were telling teams they needed to lose staff. Bread and circuses.

Not only are the wellbeing ‘resources’ on offer irrelevant to a corpus of staff dealing with manufactured precarity, the idea that those who perpetrate the cuts can also provide the salve is irrational and dishonest.

Pathologising dissent

Leveraging the idea of wellbeing support also frames the rational emotions felt and expressed by staff under these circumstances as a mental health crisis requiring individuals to seek support. There is something wrong with you, get help! Such twisted discourse is an extension of Hannah Proctor’s discussion on the pathologising of dissent, whereby resistance and challenge to injustice and oppression is framed as a mental health failure of the individual. Those of us who are angry, stressed, anxious, and sad about the hacking away at jobs – the jobs people rely on to live – are not in crisis nor in need of wellbeing support.

Nor are anger, anxiety, sadness, and fear negative emotions to be swept under the wellbeing carpet. They are normal, healthy feelings in the face of harmful actions. These harms are set in motion by senior people who claim to be the voice of ‘the institution’, employing fuzzy rationale and arguments that are a long way from justification. We need to be able to express our rational reactions collectively and individually. We reject entirely the suggestion that our outrage and fear – our ire – should be soaked up by spongey platitudes and bike rides.

If you go to the wellbeing page on the intranet, you will see a quote from Paulo Coelho (well-known to self-help devotees):

When you say ‘yes’ to others, make sure you are not saying ‘no’ to yourself.

This could work with some tweaking:

When we say ‘no’ to compulsory redundancies, we make sure we say ‘yes’ to our collective selves.