UQ staff rally against ‘Hunger Games-style’ fight for roles

Alternatively, they could accept a voluntary redundancy or “seek redeployment elsewhere across the university”, the proposal, dated November 11, says.

The National Tertiary Education Union’s UQ branch president, Associate Professor Andrew Bonnell, said he had never seen such a process for reducing staff numbers in an academic setting.

“This is the first time that I can remember – and I’ve been involved in these things for about 20 years now – that they have done what’s called a ‘spill and fill’ in an academic school restructure,” Professor Bonnell said.

The forced reapplication process was “creating a kind of Hunger Games scenario”, he added.

“Instead of having clear, objective criteria for redundancy and then justifying to individual…