Pressure rises amid tertiary job losses

It should come as no surprise that the National Tertiary Education Union undertook a 48-hour strike action at The University of Sydney earlier this month.

In the past six months, the union’s NSW branches have shown an increasing proclivity for militancy, with Western Sydney University (UWS) members twice voting in favour of protected industrial action.

Their actions in part stem from two years of rolling job losses and pay cuts wrought by the pandemic, and will likely be worsened by federal reform that, according to federal budget papers for FY2023, will shrink revenue for universities as students’ costs are lowered.

And while the financial pressures universities have faced during the past two years is evident – Universities Australia tipped 17,000 job losses and revenue losses of $1.8 billion in the first year of the pandemic – unions appear particularly aggrieved with the extent to which salary costs have been slashed in that time.

Of course, cutting salaries is an easy lever to pull in tough times, as evidenced by any number of government departments or businesses in the last two years.

New research from the University of Melbourne’s LH Martin Institute, conducted by Frank Larkins, appears to cast doubt on the broad consensus that job cuts were necessary in responding to the pandemic’s economic fallout.

That’s because, based on his findings, job losses were not always well correlated with a reduction in student fees and charges or flatlining investment returns.

Compare, for instance, The Australian National University with UWS.

Of all institutions observed, ANU’s overall financial position declined by 22.9 per cent in 2020 as student fees fell by about a third of 2019 figures, with a commensurate 5.9 per cent decrease in staff over the past two years.

UWS, however, marginally improved its net financial position in the first year of the pandemic, all the while cutting staff by about 18 per cent on 2019.

Such disparities led Professor Larkins to conclude that some universities took advantage of the pandemic to covertly pursue organisational restructures.

“The uncertain and unpredictable environment created by the pandemic presented the opportunity for universities in 2019 and 2020 to undertake structural reforms of faculties and departments, while reducing subject offerings and other curriculum reforms not necessarily driven primarily by financial necessity,” Professor Larkins wrote.

“Given that employee benefits are the dominant expenditure outlays for universities, reducing staff numbers was the major strategy in academic and administrative profile realignment.

“Casual staff have carried the main impact of staff changes, accounting for some two-thirds of all reductions on a full-time equivalent basis.”

Things are a little different here in Western Australia, particularly because the correlation between job losses and financial impact is a bit tighter, with The University of Western Australia, Edith Cowan University, Curtin University, and Murdoch University cutting staff at a similar rate to which they lost funding.

That’s better than the national average of an 8.1 per cent fall in staffing numbers against a 4.5 per cent decrease in the sector’s overall financial position.

Still, discontent among university staff and students is widely reported in WA, with a wave of redundancies drawing the ire of the NTEU throughout 2020.

Reporting of staff and student dissent escalated in 2021. In one instance, leaked data setting out the harsh realities of downsizing was disseminated through QR codes plastered across UWA’s molecular sciences school.

Tensions at that university escalated in dramatic fashion late last year after Martin Forsey, an associate professor of sociology, went to the Fair Work Commission arguing UWA had used misleading data to justify staff cuts in his department.

Fair Work ultimately found in favour of UWA on the matter. Whether any of this comes to a boil this year, given all five of the state’s universities will need to renegotiate agreements, is a matter of conjecture.

NTEU state secretary Cathy Moore did not return a request to be interviewed for this article.