University of Melbourne slashes 450 jobs as pandemic knocks $1bn from budget
Melbourne’s top university — ranked one of the best in the world — is the latest institution to feel the pain of the coronavirus pandemic, with hundreds of academic and professional staff set to lose their jobs.
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About 450 academic and professional jobs are to be cut at the University of Melbourne as the coronavirus pandemic knocks a $1 billion hole in the institution’s bottom line.
More casual and fix-term employees will lose their jobs too in the fallout from the COVID-19 crisis and the loss of revenue from international students.
The announcement follows an unsuccessful offer to university staff to accept a 2 per cent pay cut.
Vice-Chancellor Duncan Maskell said the cuts were unavoidable and a last resort.
“Our current rate of expenditure is not sustainable,’’ Professor Maskell said.
Over the past six months, we have already taken a number of steps to significantly reduce our costs and drawn down on our financial reserves to help support our staff and students through this crisis.
“With fewer students, the university must be smaller and we will need fewer staff.”
About 41 per cent of the university’s estimated 52,000 students were from overseas last year. Most this year have stayed away or returned home when the pandemic hit Victoria in March.
NTEU state assistant secretary Sarah Roberts said the cuts were disappointing and that many staff feared for their future.
The 450 figure represents more than 5 per cent of the workforce.
Also on Wednesday, Victoria University told staff it was heading for a budget hit of more than $50 million because of the loss of international student revenue.
Vice-chancellor Peter Dawkins said expenditure had already been cut by $33 million but said redundancies could follow by the end of the year.
“The focus has been on non-salary savings, freezing vacant positions that were deemed non-essential, freezing executive bonuses, and only renewing fixed term contracts and
appointing casuals that were essential,’’ he said.
He said the savings were the equivalent of 120 full-time positions.
Last month Monash University revealed it would cut 277 jobs because of an expected $350 million revenue shortfall this year.
The jobs blow comes as Melbourne University is preparing to repay millions of dollars in back pay to at least 1000 academics over the way their work was classified over several years.
Academics in some faculties were paid for tutorials as “practice classes” in a move to avoid paying the full rate. Also, academic staff were given just three minutes to mark students’ assignments.
Tertiary union, the NTEU, described the problem as “wage theft” and called for full transparency on the back pay procedures which will include former staff.
Ms Roberts said some of the practices were “scandalous”.
“The problem goes across the sector, it’s not just Melbourne Uni. We’re just getting started,’’ Ms Roberts said.
“There are myriad ways of trying to get around paying casuals for their work.’’
The union is disputing the methods in four faculties – Arts, Fine Arts and Music, Computing and Information Systems, and Engineering.
The university said that any casuals affected by the dispute would have an opportunity to seek review of their attendance and receive back pay.
“We continue to work constructively with the union through a joint working group to facilitate and oversee the remediation of past claims arising from the settlement of the dispute, and to ensure they don’t recur,’’ the statement said.
It’s believed one academic is owed an estimated $91,000 in unpaid wages.
The university was ranked 41st in the world in the latest World University Rankings.
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