Hundreds more jobs cut at Victorian universities as pandemic hits budgets
The axe is set to swing on hundreds of jobs across the troubled university sector, with two more major Melbourne campuses announcing rounds of redundancies in the coming months.
Education
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Hundreds more jobs are expected to be lost from the troubled tertiary education sector with La Trobe and Victoria universities announcing more redundancies.
Footscray-based Victoria Uni expects to lose between 100 and 190 staff over the next 18 months, Vice-Chancellor Peter Dawkins said.
The number lost would depend on the workforce’s willingness to accept changes to their employment as the uni felt the impact of a $50m revenue shortfall.
“Without an enterprise agreement variation, we would need to reduce our number of staff by about 190 over the next 18 months, which might create a situation of having to use forced redundancies,” Professor Dawkins said.
More than 230 La Trobe staff took voluntary redundancy earlier this year. Operating costs at the Bundoora-based university are also to be cut by 20 per cent.
La Trobe Vice-Chancellor Prof John Dewar expected a 25 per cent revenue drop: “Our aim is to emerge as a more resilient, future-focused and necessarily more efficient institution that will thrive in a post-COVID world.’’
It follows other university job cuts — Melbourne (450), Monash (277) and Deakin (400) — with hundreds of casual staff also released from RMIT and other campuses.
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