University of Melbourne staff are pushing for a four-day working week for professional staff, a 20 percent pay rise and new safeguards against artificial intelligence under claims lodged with management.
The National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) served its log of claims on the university on Thursday, opening negotiations for a new enterprise agreement.
The claims also include enforceable workload protections for academics.
The four-day week - sought for professional staff without any reduction in pay - is a key part of the union's push, alongside a demand to strip management of its unilateral power to set academic workloads.
Under the union's proposal, Academic Workload Committees would be established across the university with majority membership drawn from non-management academic staff and binding authority over workload decisions.
The university would also be required to protect staff against adverse effects of artificial intelligence systems - reflecting growing concern about how the technology is being deployed in higher education workplaces.
An above-inflation pay increase responds to ongoing cost-of-living pressures.
NTEU University of Melbourne Branch President David Gonzalez said staff had reached a breaking point on workloads.
"The evidence on four-day weeks is remarkably consistent - productivity holds, absenteeism drops and staff retention improves. The University of Melbourne prides itself on being evidence-led. It's time to apply that to its own working conditions.
"When workloads are set without staff input, the result is burnout, which hurts academics' ability to deliver world-class teaching and education.
"With the pace of AI's development, it's essential we have serious guardrails embedded in the agreement that protect us from harm.
"You can't keep asking staff to do more with less and then offer them a pay rise that doesn't even keep up with the cost of living.
"Staff have done the work to develop serious proposals. Now it's time for management to engage constructively on a plan to make the university work better for staff, students and the community."
