‘Mind-boggling’: Glitch exposes staff details as university reveals plan to cut jobs

Workers who used a south-east Queensland university’s redundancy calculator to look up their entitlements have had their names inadvertently revealed to co-workers, with the institution blaming a “technical issue” for the privacy breach.

Academics and professional staff began to use the calculator last week after the University of Southern Queensland, which has campuses at Toowoomba, Springfield and Ipswich, announced a restructure that would see 150 staff made redundant.

Professor Andrea Lamont-Mills, a UniSQ associate dean and branch president of the National Tertiary Education Union, said staff noticed the glitch shortly after the calculator went online.

The University of Southern Queensland said last week it would cut an additional 150 full-time positions this year.Credit: University of Southern Queensland

“A member told me that they could see 52 names of people who had downloaded the calculator or used it,” she said.

“There wasn’t any personal information there – it was just their names – but that scale of error is just mind-boggling.”

Lamont-Mills said the union understood names had been visible for more than 20 minutes. UniSQ confirmed it knew about the issue and had fixed it.

UniSQ’s proposed restructure would remove 150 full-time positions, after an earlier round of cuts in late 2024 that terminated 109 roles, including 85 redundancies and 24 pre-retirement arrangements.

Lamont-Mills said if the plans went ahead, the loss of jobs since the start of 2024 would be just under 20 per cent of the workforce.

UniSQ Vice-Chancellor Karen Nelson said the decisions came in the face of “significant financial pressures driven by rising costs and a shifting funding landscape”.

“We are proposing a transformation program to secure long-term financial sustainability following three consecutive years of deficits,” she said.

The university reported recent spending across that three-year period had exceeded income by about 7 per cent.

Members told the union about two-thirds of redundancies were expected to come from professional staff positions, with the remaining jobs cut from academic roles – which include teaching and research positions.

“If those jobs are lost predominantly from Toowoomba, it’s not as if there’s another university around the corner [that] staff can get a job at,” Lamont-Mills said.

The university also announced plans for a “high-level organisational transformation” that would condense 12 schools, nine research centres, and the UniSQ pathways college into eight schools.

“We are committed to consulting with and supporting our staff and engaging with our students as part of a staged consultation process that won’t be finalised until October 2025,” Nelson said.

However, Lamont-Mills said some workers felt the feedback process was already “set in stone”.

“It’s been talked about as though this is a fait accompli,” she said.

She added workers were concerned they hadn’t been given enough time or detail about the changes, making it difficult to provide “meaningful” feedback.

The NTEU has called for further “genuine consultation” with staff, amid fears UniSQ could progress to forced redundancies quicker than anticipated. It said staff cuts were expected as early as July.

Nelson said staff had been told “significant additional savings” would be necessary this year, and said no final decisions had been made.

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