AI has become the latest battleground in university working conditions.
Pay, job security and workloads used to be the big reasons uni staff went on strike.
You can now add AI to that list.
University of Sydney staff will walk off the job for 24 hours on Wednesday, September 2, as negotiations over a new Enterprise Agreement continue to stall — with artificial intelligence emerging as one of the major sticking points.
Members of the University of Sydney branch of the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) are pushing for enforceable protections around how AI can be used in the workplace, including safeguards against the technology being used to replace jobs, increase workloads or undermine academic and professional judgement.
It’s a pretty modern addition to the industrial relations checklist.
The union is also fighting over more familiar territory, including pay, casual superannuation, job security and proposed teaching-focused roles.
But AI has become a particularly thorny issue because staff want protections written into their Enterprise Agreement, rather than left to university policy.
In other words, this isn’t really a fight over whether universities will use AI.
That ship has sailed.
It’s about what happens to the people working there when they do.
