More jobs set to go at Australian National University

An Australian university has tripled its tally of proposed job cuts just two days after asking staff to preserve jobs by forgoing a pay rise.

New restructures flagged at the Australian National University (ANU) would eliminate 108 positions, 87 of them currently filled, while creating 21 new posts.

The announcements came a day after hundreds of National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) members rallied to protest against another 50 job losses announced almost a fortnight earlier.

A day before that, vice-chancellor Genevieve Bell had asked staff to waive December’s 2.5 per cent salary increase, saying it could reduce the need for salary savings by 15 per cent.  

Professor Bell said the newly announced restructures would be “the final change proposals for 2024. They provide a strong strategic framework for how we intend to move forward with the renewal process,” she told staff in an email.

The university’s NTEU branch president, Millan Pintos-Lopez, said colleagues were “furious that a vice-chancellor is promising to save jobs while cutting them”.

“Staff were asked to give up pay to save jobs in 2020. It didn’t save jobs then and it won’t save jobs this time around.”

ANU convinced staff to postpone salary increases scheduled for 2020 and 2021, just months before announcing 215 redundancies during the darkest days of the Covid-19 pandemic. At the time, the university said up to 90 more jobs would have gone “but for the deferral of the pay rises”.

The union estimates that the university’s latest salary savings target of A$100 million (£51 million) equates to 638 jobs. ANU has indicated that “further changes” will be required in 2025.

Observers fear the rolling job cut announcements at ANU could be a taste of things to come elsewhere, as a sector already struggling with inflation, rising compliance costs and the after-effects of Covid incurs losses of hundreds of millions of dollars due to the federal government’s international education crackdown.

The proposed restructures at ANU affect the university’s facilities and services division and its research and academic support sections.

Staff have been given two weeks to provide feedback on the proposals.

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com