Staff have made a bold bid to overhaul working conditions at Australia's most prestigious university
University of Melbourne staff are seeking a four-day working week for professional staff, a 20% pay rise and new protections against the impact of artificial intelligence in a fresh industrial push on campus.
The National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) has served a log of claims on the university, formally opening negotiations for a new enterprise agreement.
Alongside the shorter working week proposal – which would apply to professional staff with no loss of pay – the union is calling for enforceable workload protections for academics and an end to management’s unilateral control over how academic workloads are set.
Under the NTEU plan, Academic Workload Committees would be established across the university, made up predominantly of non-management academic staff and given binding authority over workload decisions.
The union is also demanding the university commit to protecting staff from adverse effects of artificial intelligence systems, reflecting mounting concern among higher education workers about how rapidly evolving technologies are being deployed in teaching and administration.
An above-inflation pay rise is another key claim, which the union says is needed to address ongoing cost-of-living pressures.
NTEU University of Melbourne branch president David Gonzalez said staff had reached “breaking point” over workloads and urged the institution to live up to its rhetoric around evidence-based practice.
"The evidence on four-day weeks is remarkably consistent - productivity holds, absenteeism drops and staff retention improves. The University of Melbourne prides itself on being evidence-led. It's time to apply that to its own working conditions," he said.
According to Gonzalez, setting workloads without the input of staff is leading to burnout and affects the academics' ability to educate.
On top of that, he identified issues that may stem from the fast pace that AI is developing and urged the university to consider "serious guardrails" to "protect us fron harm."
"You can't keep asking staff to do more with less and then offer them a pay rise that doesn't even keep up with the cost of living," added Gonzalez.
“Staff have done the work to develop serious proposals. Now it’s time for management to engage constructively on a plan to make the university work better for staff, students and the community."
