Last year management responded to the pandemic with savings measures, including job cuts- there are more to come

In November, 209 voluntary redundancies were announced, ahead of a  “professional services redesign” for staff in finance, data & reporting, occupational health and safety, facilities management, research outputs and post-award finance support, (CMM November 24). Some people to lose their jobs finally heard this month (CMM February 10).

But it’s not over yet. Last year’s “pandemic reset” of “transactional and advisory services” to see if they could be better delivered by shared functions than separate division (CMM August 28) now looks like a unit by unit retrenchment programme. And what happens can sometimes depend on the strength and volume, of the case supporters of existing units can make in consultations over proposed cuts.

Staff and supporters of the vet school’s teaching hospital at Werribee are cross about staff losses last year and the new services restructure in-place. “The university’s Pandemic Reset Programme proposals do not recognise the correlation between skilled professional staff and teaching in a hospital that provides a high standard of care,” they argue in a letter to Vet and Ag Science dean John Fazakerley.

And there’s a meeting today to protest a management proposal to outsource grounds maintenance, “to save a negligible amount of money.”

But the training and engagement team in Research Computing Services, which was for the chop, apparently now isn’t. The team manages research computing infrastructure and “helps researchers find the best options for creating, analysing, collecting and managing their data.”

“We are concerned that this training will be replaced by the outsourcing of services and a move to user-pays models,” the team stated in a pitch to continue.

Which appears was heard. The team will now move to the Melbourne Data Analytics Programme.

The pain COVID-19 created at Uni Melbourne is not over yet.