Union and university body clash over job loss predictions

Australia’s academic union has demanded federal government protection from a “cruel and unfair attack” on staff, after the representative body for universities warned that visa policy changes could cost the sector one in 10 jobs.

Universities Australia (UA) chief executive Luke Sheehy told a Senate committee that a 23 per cent reduction in the issuance of student visas over the past year equated to 59,410 university students.

“The impact of having some 60,000 fewer international students arrive on our shores is significant,” he said. “It would represent a A$4.3 billion [£2.2 billion] hit to the economy and could cost the university sector alone over 14,000 jobs, not to mention the flow-on effect for small businesses.”

The National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) accused UA of “threatening to slash” the university workforce as a “bargaining tool” against Canberra. NTEU president Alison Barnes said uncertainty around the government’s international education changes had created a “vacuum”, allowing “opportunistic vice-chancellors” to “put job losses on the table”.

“It’s simply not good enough to use university staff as political footballs that are regularly subjected to wage theft, insecure work and unmanageable workloads,” Dr Barnes said. “The federal government must step in to ensure university leaders are held to account and don’t ram through damaging cuts that hurt students, staff and society.”

Fourteen thousand staff would equate to 10 per cent of the university workforce. While staff headcounts are elusive because of inconsistencies in the way casual academics are tallied, the Department of Education says universities employed the equivalent of 131,470 full-time staff in 2022.

In June, Mr Sheehy predicted that the visa policy reforms would cost 4,500 university jobs. UA said the new and much higher estimate was based on comparisons of visa grant statistics from recent years. It said four international enrolments typically supported the employment of one staff member.

The representative body said its job loss prediction was not a threat. It said it did not have any influence over employment, which was managed at institutional level. It did not want to see job losses in the sector and was simply highlighting the potential consequences of the government’s policy changes.

Migration expert Abul Rizvi said predictions of declining student numbers had been exaggerated, adding that 2023 was an unrealistic basis for comparison, because pent-up demand during Covid fuelled record student arrivals – which were never going to be sustained – after the borders reopened.

NTEU policy and research officer Kieran McCarron said overinflated predictions of enrolment declines presented “real” risks for staff. “University managements are extremely fiscally conservative,” he told the Senate committee.

“They will start cutting jobs in advance of any suspected potential revenue losses they think might be coming up ahead. During Covid…they didn’t actually wait for student enrolments to stop. They started cutting jobs immediately, and they went for the most insecure workers first. The type of decision-makers that we see in this type of situation – that needs to be considered.”

The NTEU’s director of public policy and strategic research, Terri MacDonald, claimed that universities could also use the spectre of declining enrolments to drive down wages – particularly in their subsidiary companies.

“From our perspective, we will definitely see…any sort of funding cut at the bargaining table, whether it’s real or not,” Dr MacDonald told the committee.

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com