Redundancies mount as Monash announces successive rounds of job losses
While Vice-Chancellor Pickering gives softball interviews to the Australian Financial Review, she's also busy restructuring and letting go of staff.
Monash hasn’t undertaken the widespread slash and burn of ANU or Wollongong, but there is a slow drip of smaller redundancy rounds that are starting to add up.
This augurs ill for 2025. Vice-Chancellor Pickering and the board appear to be readying themselves for a big cost-cutting round in the new year.
Redundancies are obviously terrible for the staff affected. A lot of the jobs being lost are not even formal redundancies, but simply staff being let go at the end of their contracts, which is much worse for them in terms of severance and entitlements. Teaching arrangements for 2025 remain extremely uncertain. Casual academics in particular are in total limbo, with absolutely no indication from either the Faculties or Central about how much teaching will be needed in the new year.
In a cloak-and-dagger powerplay like a scene from a prestige television drama, senior executive Doron Ben-Meir has been forced out of the University, and his entire team has been made redundant or moved to other portfolios. There will be 19 redundancies.
The School of Rural Health at Bendigo is being restructured after a secret review that staff were not consulted on and are not allowed to see – seven professional staff are being let go.
360info, Andrew Jaspan’s public-interest journalism and anti-disinformation play that Margaret Gardner funded, is being wound up. Nine staff are being made redundant
We know of at least four rounds of job cuts at Monash University in recent months:
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Enterprise and Engagement Portfolio: 19 redundancies, more than 30 staff reallocated or redeployed
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Monash Residential Services: 41 fixed-term residential staff let go at the end of their contracts
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FAST Team: 3 redundancies, 70-100 casual professional staff let go at the end of their contracts
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360Info: 9 redundancies
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School of Rural Health Bendigo: 7 long-term professional staff let go at the end of their contracts
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Casual academics: Who knows? Hundreds, perhaps more than 1,000 casual academics will not be given teaching work next year
Statewide Day of Action against the job cuts
Across the country, there’s a lot of this going on. Universities are using the spectre of the government’s international student caps to ram through job cuts that are unnecessary and devastating for the staff affected.
In recent weeks, over 1,000 job cuts have been announced across Australia. Here in Victoria, Fed Uni, La Trobe and Swinburne have announced redundancies. ANU has even asked staff to forego their NTEU-negotiated pay increases to avoid further cuts.
These caps are providing a convenient justification for universities to downsize and shift more workload onto fewer staff—including at Monash. This isn’t just about responding to government policy; it’s about organisational priorities.
We’re organising a statewide all-staff meeting on Wednesday 27 November.
The online meeting will discuss how these cuts will impact you and your colleagues, how universities are using these caps to justify pre-planned downsizing, and how we can stand together and push back.
When: 12.30 Wednesday, 27 November
Link: https://www.nteu.au/News_Articles/Local_News/VIC/international_caps_uni_jobs_at_risk.aspx
Complete the form on the page above to receive your Zoom link for the meeting - feel free to share with colleagues in your workplace.
EOI process for PhD Fellows and Periodic Academic contracts is a shambles
Monash’s bungled roll-out of less insecure teaching contracts shows, once again, how bad the University is at managing this stuff.
Casual academic staff in the faculties are being sent emails from their Deans informing them that Expressions of Interest have opened for PhD teaching contracts and Continuing (Defined Period) Academic contracts starting in 2025.
As we’ve consistently maintained, we don’t love these contracts. They have very high teaching workloads and Periodic Academics will only be paid for 40 weeks a year, despite their roles being supposedly ongoing. However, we recognise that they are less insecure than the endless grind of casual academic work, and we have been assisting casual members who want to apply for them.
The EOI roll-out has been a shambles. Different faculties are rolling out their expressions on different timelines. In Arts, one of the most affected faculties, casual staff were only given 3 working days to apply, with the deadline mysteriously set for Sunday night this weekend. MNHS’s emails haven’t even been sent yet.
Not all staff have been sent the emails with the links to the EOI pages. There is a different EOI page for each faculty -- again, we don’t know why. It all seems quite rushed and chaotic.
Worse, many senior teaching staff and unit coordinators haven’t been sent the emails either, so they can’t forward them on their tutors. We’ve even been asked by senior academics to forward on the emails, so they can send them on to their tutors. It’s a shambolic process.
We have some of the links to the EOI pages here. As we get more we’ll forward them.
Arts faculty EOI: https://careers.pageuppeople.com/513/cw/en/job/671215/seeking-expressions-of-interest-from-sessional-staff-for-phd-teaching-fellow-and-continuing-defined-periods-academic-employment-opportunities
Law faculty EOI: https://careers.pageuppeople.com/513/cw/en/job/671048/seeking-expressions-of-interest-from-sessional-staff-for-fixedterm-and-continuing-employment-opportunities-faculty-of-law
If the University had bothered to consult with staff and the Union about this process, we could have pointed out that sending out confusing emails with a few days' notice in the middle of marking is not a great process. But this University is allergic to negative feedback of any kind.
By the way, we tried to post something about this Workplace yesterday, but our post has not been approved.
Monash wage theft victims finally get their day in court: 4- 6 December
After more than two years of delay and obstruction form Monash management, our Federal Court case against the university for widespread wage theft from casual academics finally reaches an open hearing on 4 December.
This is a very big day for us. We allege that thousands of casual academics have had their wages unlawfully unpaid. Staff were directed to teach scheduled student consultations without pay. The backpay could be worth millions.
All this from a university that has already admitted to $10m in underpayments to more than 2,000 staff members over more than six years between 2014 and 2021.
We’re going to be holding an action outside the Federal Court to highlight the injustice here. We’ll have the details closer to the date, but put it in your diaries. The court hearings are open to the public and we’ll be there live-blogging it on various social platforms. We’ll also send you some updates here. We want wage justice for casual staff at our university. It’s not a big ask: all staff deserve to be paid their lawful entitlements.
We also want everyone to know that Sharon Pickering was the Dean of Arts, during the time when these underpayments were rampant in the faculty.
NTEU calls for Professor Shane Bullock to step down as head of Rural Health
The Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences has rammed through a particularly distressing restructure in the School of Rural Health at Bendigo
As many as seven professional staff are being let go. These staff members are dedicated teachers and professionals who play a vital role in delivering educational services to Monash University rural health students at Bendigo.
The restructure was announced as the result of a secret review of the Bendigo school by the Faculty of MNHS. Professors Wayne Hodgson and Shane Bullock appear to have been the key decision makers.
Staff were not consulted about this review, or even told of its existence, until this decision was announced. Indeed, despite asking to see the review document, staff have been told they are not allowed to see it. The director of Monash Rural Health Bendigo, Dr Chris Holmes, was not told about the decision either. He has since tendered his resignation, and we understand that other teaching doctors at Bendigo may also refuse to teach in the School next year.
A meeting was held with staff in October that the NTEU attended. It was one of the most arrogant and disrespectful displays from Monash management we’ve seen. Staff were told the decision would not be changed, that the review was secret, that they would not be consulted, and the University had “managerial prerogative” to ram this through. What a disgrace.
The NTEU calls for the Director of the School of Rural Health, Professor Shane Bullock, to step down, pending an investigation of this secret review and the way in which this restructure is being implemented.
We call for the University to honour the consultation provisions of the Enterprise Agreement, undertake a formal consultation process with staff, and to safeguard the staffing levels and employment security of teaching and professional staff at Bendigo Rural Health.
University staff survey results still largely hidden from staff
The results from the University survey of staff are apparently out, or so we’ve been told by Vice-Chancellor Pickering.
Some staff have seen some results about their work area. Most staff have not. Staff certainly haven’t been shown the full results across the University. This process has been opaque and highly managed by the University from the outset. The survey was outsourced to a private provider, who didn’t respond to the NTEU’s emails, and the methodology and privacy provisions of the survey are questionable.
There should be no reason why we can’t know how staff feel about the way the University is being managed, and also to compare results between faculties and operational work areas. A proper publication of results would also allow Monash staff to scrutinise the results and to verify the Vice-Chancellor’s optimistic statements about staff sentiment.
Monash is meant to be a public university. We should know the results of this expensive exercise. We call on Vice-Chancellor Pickering to release the full results of the survey (with appropriate redactions where staff privacy might be threatened).
Parking campaign update
Members working on the Parking Campaign have collated the feedback from students and staff on how the impacts to their health and wellbeing. You can view the final report here. The Vice-Chancellor has already made a minor concession in response to this campaign form staff and students – which shows we’re winning.
A couple of weeks ago, we decided to put a post on Workplace. While it appears that initially, they had no intention of approving the Workplace post, they relented. They were reminded of the Enterprise Agreement and its commitment to Intellectual and Academic Freedom. You can view, like and comment on the post here.
On behalf of the union, we would like to thank the staff and students who shared their story of how they were personally impacted by the punitive parking policies at Monash University.
There's more to do. Union Health and Safety Representatives have engaged the university on parking policy and the hazards of using it. Although we hope that we can find some equitable and fair solutions that work for all users, we are prepared for a no response should it take place.
Monash’s poisonous partnership with Woodside must end
If you’re a long-term member of the NTEU at Monash, you’ll know we’ve been campaigning against our university’s craven partnership with fossil fuel giant Woodside for years now. The Stop Woodside Monash Group has grown in recent times and is taking up the fight against this dirty deal.
Here’s a message from Stop Woodside Monash that we endorse:
It’s clear that the effects of global heating are starting to bite. We see the relentless feed of temperature records being broken, including the past 15 months of global temperatures being the hottest ever recorded. We are starting to cook the planet.
Monash does some excellent work on climate, supporting world-leading researchers. Less well known is that Monash undermines these efforts by allowing itself to partner with fossil fuel companies: especially Woodside Energy, Australia’s largest oil and gas company.
Woodside is one of the world’s dirtiest companies, with one of the largest emissions footprints of any firm. In 2021 it acquired BHP’s oil and gas interests, and in 2024 it acquired American gas company Tellurian. Not even its own shareholders are convinced by Woodside’s very weak plan to address its scope 1 and 2 emissions, with 58% voting it down in April this year – a world-first for a corporation.
Why on earth is Monash, a respectable institution with admirable sustainability goals, partnering with one of the worst fossil fuel companies? The answer is of course, money. The lure of this lucrative partnership appears to be trumping its own sustainability and climate goals.
What is Woodside getting for its money? This is also obvious – it gets to leech off the hard-earned social capital of Monash. In other words, it gets some valuable greenwashing. Greenwashing is such a prominent feature of doing business these days that there is currently a federal senate inquiry into it.
The partnership with Woodside is damaging Monash’s reputation. We need to break ties with this unconscionable company. There is an opportunity approaching, since we believe that the partnership agreement will end in 2025.
To this end, a grass-roots group of students and staff has formed at Monash, and we are starting to raise awareness of the poisonous and unconscionable partnership with Woodside. The group is known as Stop Woodside Monash (SWM). We believe this is our part to play in the ubiquitous climate action that is required to push back on fossil fuel interests endangering our future for their own selfish interests.
To stay informed, please join us, and help out if you can.
Supporting and understanding the needs of disabled members and carers
We recorgnise there can be barriers and stigma that our disabled members and carers may face in the workplace. We also recognise that this is likely to be amplified in the wake of recent changes to the NDIS.
We are hoping to gather thoughts from affected members to help us determine your needs, and how the union can best support you and advocate for you. If you have a few minutes, please fill in our survey.
Stay in touch
Well done to all our colleagues for making it to November! A big shoutout to everyone in marking hell, and to professional staff rushing to meet crazy deadlines by the end of the year.
As we always say, stay in touch. A union is simply an association of humans who support each other in their workplace. Unlike Monash’s senior leadership, we actually like talking to you! We are always happy to hear from our colleagues, so please get in touch.
If you need to contact your union, email the branch at [email protected].
In solidarity,
Ben Eltham
On behalf of the NTEU Monash branch committee