Union representatives at Charles Sturt University have shared fresh concerns for the wellbeing of staff ahead of another round of job losses.
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The third round of cost-cutting measures was announced on Wednesday as the university attempts to soften its $49.5 million forecast deficit by the end of 2021.
While restructuring its schools and merging its discipline areas, the university will seek to remove 16 full-time equivalent professional roles across its campuses.
It will also potentially affect up to 20 academic leadership positions.
Representative of the National Tertiary Education Union, Dr Helen Masterman-Smith, said there was grave concern the remaining staff would be left with untenable workloads.
"We're just too short-staffed as it is and this will exacerbate the problem," Dr Masterman-Smith said.
"The 16 jobs that will be made redundant are primarily professional positions that work directly with academics.
"Assumptions have been made on how the workload will be managed, and those assumptions don't seem to stack up with reality."
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Interim Vice-Chancellor Professor John Germov said the proposed changes bring together like-subjects to achieve savings while minimising jobs lost.
"It is important to emphasise that although we have had to reduce the number of positions, new roles have been created and there are also vacant roles, which impacted staff will have priority to apply for," he said.
Although the university has said, nearly all of the academic staff affected by the merging of schools will retain their positions, the union says there will be significant impacts on the available career pathways in the future.
"The merging of schools will lead to senior academic positions being lost," Dr Masterman-Smith said.
For those senior-level academics who will lose the leadership positions, the union fears there will also be an impact on job security and pay packets.
"It's going to be an extremely difficult next couple of years dealing with the aftermaths of these decisions," Dr Masterman-Smith said.
The first rounds of cuts last year affected both academic and administrative staff at the university.
Semester 1 is yet to begin in March, but Dr Masterman-Smith said there has already been an increase to the permanent workload of staff over the past couple of months of summer schools and residential classes.
"Even in the past few weeks we've seen a spike in complaints about workload," Dr Masterman-Smith said.
"COVID is spurring a massive increase in enrolments and the staff have no idea how they're going to cope with a reduced staffing profile."
With this latest round now representing the third lot of cuts, Dr Masterman-Smith said the union would be bracing for more in the near future.