Massey staff launch last-ditch effort to save jobs

Wednesday, 31 January 2024

Staff from Massey University’s college of humanities and social sciences hope their alternative to a proposed restructure will save jobs and money.

Massey has been looking at ways of cutting costs as it deals with a forecast $53 million loss for the year. In October it released a proposal for change in the college of humanities and social sciences that the Tertiary Education Union feared would result in 40 job losses in two of the college’s schools.

The feedback period for the proposal closed on Friday. A group of staff from the college, including Professor Lisa Emerson, and the union had presented Massey with an alternative proposal.

Emerson said their proposal did not require job cuts and showed an increased cost saving of $6.2m and increased revenue of $4.2m, “considerably outperforming the current proposal in terms of creating a sustainable future for the college”.

She said they had found problems with Massey’s proposal. Many staff members had not had a performance review for years and the university had not looked at staff workloads, so there was no evidence of overstaffing, she said.

“Our workload estimates suggest that the current academic offer could not safely be offered by the proposed staffing levels, thus jeopardising staff wellbeing and student success.”

Instead of cutting jobs, Emerson believed the college’s deficit could be managed through all-of-college non-staff savings, such as restrictions on travel and training, a reduction on office costs, and a more accurate forecast of research income.

“The alternative proposal also provides a planned strategic approach to revising the academic offer and attracting new internal and international students. Which would be of benefit to both the university and [Palmerston North].”

Emerson said that if the existing proposal went ahead, it would disrupt students, because staff would change midway through semester one.

The college’s pro vice-chancellor, Cynthia White, said she would look at the alternative proposal with an open mind and identify what might be workable.

But the university’s financial problems, caused by things such a drop in international students after the Covid-19 pandemic and rising costs, were driving the need for change, so White had to work with the realities of the financial situation.

“The financial shortfall we’re experiencing is not going to be offset by anything short of the significant changes I’ve proposed.”

She said what the alternative had proposed, such as staff reducing their leave balances, would not displace the $6.5m deficit the college was facing for the year.

The deficit was improved by savings of $2.9m through the voluntary redundancies last year of 24 staff members.

“I made it clear at the time I called for voluntary cessation, if we didn’t have a significant number of staff I would look for other ways to reduce staffing. This is a very challenging situation.”

There would not be any changes to the academic offering this year, and White said the university was answering the union’s questions about workloads. Performance reviews were not part of this process, she said.

The university was unable to do workload models now because it did not know what this year’s student numbers would be.

White said research income was not something to rely on in the long term for staffing because it varied.

The university had concerns with other parts of the proposal but wanted to discuss that with the union before commenting publicly.

Politics professor Richard Shaw was involved with the alternative proposal and hoped Massey would slow down with the proposed restructure because there was optimism about future enrolments and an increase in student numbers.

He said staff were the people who generated revenue through enrolments, consultancy and research grants, so cutting staff would cause revenue to drop.

“There are short-term savings, but in the long term it’s being eroded.”

A decision would be made in February.