“Fightback,” a militant caucus within the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) launched a petition to oppose job cuts and hiring restrictions on Tuesday, August 13 in response to a letter Vice Chancellor Mark Scott sent to staff on the same day.
“Staff are already overworked, underpaid and struggling with a cost of living crisis,” the preamble to the petition read, “now the livelihoods of the people who ensure the University functions every day are being threatened”
Scott told staff that management would be considering “how we would deal with the impacts of the financial shortfalls” caused by the Federal Government’s proposed cap on international student enrolment.
“Without detail on the scope of the proposed caps on international students and how they will apply to individual institutions, the university has needed to take some precautionary measures in order to safeguard our institution and community,” Scott said.
Scott announced that management would be “monitoring continuing and fixed term recruitment and contract extensions” on a case-by-case basis, and “reconsidering the scope of our activities in 2025.”
Fightback said that “in practice, this means job cuts, hiring freezes and restructures.”
In a letter sent to the union membership yesterday, President of the USyd branch of the NTEU Nick Riemer stated that the Vice Chancellor “has clearly signalled the possibility of job cuts.”
“Job security is an absolute priority for the NTEU,” Riemer said, “and we will use very mechanism at our disposal to safeguard employment for all our members” Riemer also announced that he will be privately meeting with management on Monday to “discuss their intentions” and to “advocate for job security.”
The University of Sydney is the country’s largest enroller of international students, with 46 per cent of its students coming from overseas. According to USyd’s Annual Financial Report, international student fees accounted for 44 percent of its revenue last year.
Many stakeholders have stressed the negative implications of the upcoming cap on enrolment, given Australian Universities’ reliance on international students’ fees. Universities Australia chief executive Luke Sheehy said that the policy could lead to 14,000 job cuts across the tertiary education sector.
Usyd’s Annual Financial Report recorded a surplus of 351.8 million in 2023, following on from a $298.5 million surplus in 2022, and a 1.3 billion surplus in 2021.
Noting these three consecutive years of surpluses, Fightback stated that there was “no excuse” for University management to cut down on jobs and hiring practices, and that “the university should dip into” these funds to support its staff.
An Honi analysis reported that despite recording a surplus on paper, USyd operated at a loss of 9.4 million last year due to additional expenditures on quarantined grants and investment funds among others. In 2022, the institution still made a profit of a net $200 million (from a gross 298.5 million).
In the petition, Fightback alleged that Mark Scott had “assured staff the University had set aside sufficient funds to support future building projects” at a recent Town Hall meeting.
“Instead of bloated executive salaries and splashing cash on buildings and marketing, this money should be used to provide staff with job security and help long term casualised and fixed-term staff transition to secure jobs,” Fightback said.
Fightback was formed during the 2020 Covid recession to oppose the Jobs Protection Framework, a deal between national NTEU leadership and universities across the country that proposed a 15 percent pay cut on the basis that job security would be prioritised.
In an interview for Honi, Alma Torlakovic, one of the founders of NTEU fightback, noted that “usually when those sorts of wage cuts happen, it’s because of an attack from either the government or bosses within the industry. What was different about 2020 was that our own union leadership negotiated a wage cut. It was a historic betrayal”
Despite NTEU leaders’ repeated concessions, universities experienced record job losses. According to Torlakovic, job cuts occurred at higher rates in areas where staff accepted the proposed wage cuts.
“There is a continuity between 2020 and now, ” Torlakovic said.
“In 2020, the union leadership’s solution to a very similar situation — a drop in international student enrolments — was to make staff pay for the crisis and suffer wage cuts,” Torlakovic said.
The organiser said that Fightback’s intervention was critical: “if we had not intervened, we would have seen [the JPF] rolled out as a national strategy, and in fact it was intended as a national strategy. We drew a line in the sand and actually fought for what’s at the heart of the union, which is about fighting for members’ pay and conditions.”
In his letter, Riemer stated: “for years, staff have been pummelled from one crisis to another.” He refers to the JPF as a series of “austerity measures” imposed by management, which “led to a $1B operating surplus.”
“This latest attack is a logical consequence of university leaders’ failure to defend their own institutions, which governments have starved of funds and made independent on student fees,” Riemer said.
Torlakovic noted that “restructuring” has already been occurring in several areas of the university prior to the Vice Chancellor’s announcement, including the library, ICT and DVCE. More recently, a restructuring of the Business School has been announced.
“We’ve already seen restrictions on hiring casuals and extending fixed-term contracts, whereas normally we might see extensions to both of these.”
One of Fightback’s demands during the last strike campaign was for the University to guarantee First Nations employment. “It is an absolute disgrace that we are located between Redfern and Glebe and barely any of the First Nations staff employed at the University are on ongoing contract and numbers are nowhere near where they should be,” Torlakovic stated.
“Given that a lot of First Nations staff are casual/fixed-term, one of the big risks of this round of cuts is that we lose the few First Nations staff we have on campus,” Torlakovic continued.
In a statement for Honi Lucy Nicholls, member of NTEU Branch Committee and convenor of Casuals Network, who said that the USyd Enterprise Agreement’s “force majeure” clause for EA330 jobs is “increasingly relevant” as USyd “gestures toward a hiring freeze and job cuts.”
“This clause effectively gives management an ‘out’ from their commitment to create 330 new jobs in the event of adverse financial circumstances, such as a drop in student enrolments. For many precarious staff, the already remote hope of job security is fading fast.”
“We are the first to go in job cuts, despite our essential contribution to the university. We need our permanent colleagues to stand with us: it may be us now, but they will be next.”
“Job cuts affect everyone,” Fightback has stated in their petition. “The workload doesn’t just disappear when positions are cut. Instead, remaining staff are burdened with additional work without any additional pay. The only winner is the University’s bottom line.”
When asked about the potential of forewarned job cuts to mobilise members again, Torlakovic said that Fightback “will certainly be fighting for that to happen. I think we’ll see a lot of staff who have nothing to lose, and have no choice but to fight… there is a class divide within the university itself.”
“At the end of the day, the university cares more about making profits than it does about staff job security,” Torlakovic said.
A USyd spokesperson said that without consultation on the proposed caps and clarity on their scale, the institution needed to “take some precautionary measures in order to safeguard our institution and community”.
“We wrote to the unions asking to meet as soon as possible given our commitment to working collegially,” the spokesperson continued, “Management will meet the NTEU and the CPSU on Monday to discuss this further.”
“No job cuts have been indicated and hiring is still progressing,” the spokesperson said, “however, recruitment and fixed term contract extensions will now additionally be assessed by the University Executive until we have greater clarity.”
“Consideration will also be given to workload impacts of decisions,” the spokesperson concluded, “recruitment can continue where it is considered necessary even in the context of the challenge presented in 2025.”
