Thousands of USYD staff to strike over alleged AI dispute

In what is already a tumultuous environment in the tertiary education sector amid inquiries into university governance, course cuts, and underpayments, employees from The University of Sydney will be taking protection action in the coming days due to AI protection deficiencies.

According to the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) NSW division, university management has not budged on AI protections, equal redundancy pay for professional staff, the removal of forced redundancies, and potential new categories of employment the union alleges will upend job security and performance capability.

These new categories have been identified as destroyers of the “teaching-research nexus” and, along with alleged proposals to introduce management provisions that reduce university obligations to genuinely consult, have led to the decision to strike while union members continue to negotiate a new enterprise bargaining agreement with management.

The stop work is likely to disrupt day-to-day operations, with the university having started semester two teaching on 2 August.

As reported by The Sydney Morning Herald, NTEU NSW division secretary Vince Caughley said: “We want enforceable protections against AI being used to cut jobs, intensity workloads, undermine academic and professional judgment, or replace work and human interaction that are fundamental to a university.”

“There is a real danger that university management has drunk the AI Kool-Aid.”

Further, NTEU branch president and university instructor Peter Chen said: “The University of Sydney has two sides. On one, we are a storied institution based on research-active scholars who bring that expertise to the wider world and into their lecture theatres and tutorial rooms.”

“The other: the university is massively dependent on insecure employment, fixated-term and casual workers.”

“The NTEU wants to secure ongoing work for as many fixed-term and casual workers as possible – we’re currently in the Fair Work Commission because management has failed to fill 90 of the 330 new roles they agreed to create in the current agreement and also failed to achieve the targeted 20 per cent reduction in academic casual employees.”

Chen continued: “Management would prefer to create teaching-only roles with no research, undermining the research-teaching nexus that is what has made Sydney Australia’s #1 university.”

A university spokesperson told The Sydney Morning Herald the industrial action was “premature”, adding: “We agree using AI ethically requires a human-centred approach and our Responsible AI Framework, principles and guardrails that govern use have been developed with this as a key value.”

“AI is undeniably changing the modern workforce, and we consider it our responsibility to make sure our staff have the opportunities and capabilities they need to drive our research, education and operations.”

Caughley said: “The major concern is the extraordinarily cavalier way this is being approached.”

The 24-hour strike has been set for Wednesday, 2 September.

Want to see more stories from trusted news sources?
Make HR Leader a preferred news source on Google.