\u201cPeople were surprised, they\u2019re obviously upset, people are worried about increasing workload, as well as it doesn\u2019t sound like, if anyone takes redundancy, that they would be replaced.\u201d<\/p>\n
Staff were told the university was losing some of its government funding and enrolments had not hit targets, Vink said.<\/p>\n
The university revealed the plan at an all-staff meeting yesterday afternoon, where it announced all permanent staff would be offered \u201cenhanced retirement and enhanced voluntary cessation packages\u201d, and had until April 23 to apply.<\/p>\n
There was a lack of detail in the announcement, Vink said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere wasn\u2019t a lot of clarity in the messaging at the meeting. <\/p>\n
\u201cThere was supposed to be a memo for people to have a look at after the meeting, but that didn\u2019t come out for another hour, so we\u2019re sitting around twiddling our thumbs, wondering what it\u2019s all about.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is a degree of vagueness about the whole thing.\u201d<\/p>\n
The union would prioritise clarifying details, including information on how and why it had come to this, he said.<\/p>\n
The university invited staff to propose ideas to save money, increase student numbers or improve the university\u2019s finances, but Vink said he did not believe it was the staff\u2019s role to propose those types of solutions.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe vice-chancellor said if anyone can think of ideas to come to him, but I would think that\u2019s why he gets paid the big bucks, because he should be thinking of those sorts of things.\u201d<\/p>\n
Questions were raised about the university\u2019s capital programme, which included a number of new buildings, and whether those works could be stopped or put on hold.<\/p>\n
\u201cI know students don\u2019t come to a university to see the buildings, they come to university to be taught by the experts. <\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s certainly how I remember my university \u2013 I really don\u2019t remember the buildings much at all, I remember the inspirational lectures I had.\u201d<\/p>\n
The speed of the process was worrying, especially given existing concerns about workload, Vink said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is all supposed to be decided on in late May and wrapped up by June.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat gives us just over a month to try and figure out the workload the people leaving have had and then be able to school up everyone else who\u2019s got to carry the burden on how to do those jobs before the person leaves.\u201d<\/p>\n
– RNZ<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cPeople were surprised, they\u2019re obviously upset, people are worried about increasing workload, as well as it doesn\u2019t sound…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":349049,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[24041,3588,23373,55471,232,55605,23832,55606,111,43,139,69,61,1528],"class_list":["post-349048","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-zealand","tag-24041","tag-cut","tag-equivalent","tag-fulltime","tag-jobs","tag-keiller","tag-lincoln","tag-macduff","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-to","tag-university"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349048","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=349048"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349048\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/349049"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=349048"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=349048"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=349048"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}