With the university-age population in this part of the province declining and operating costs on the increase, Laurentian University is looking to reduce its workforce, and it plans to do so through attrition, university president Dominic Giroux told Sudbury.com this week.
The 300 members of the Laurentian University Staff Union (LUSU) and 100 non-union workers have been offered a number of options in exchange for either leaving the university or reducing how much they work.
These options include taking an unpaid leave of absence, going to part-time hours, having their full medical benefits bridged to early retirement, or having their salary continued for a year after they leave the university, Giroux said.
Despite the efforts to reduce staffing levels, the university has not set a target for how many people it wants to shed.
While Laurentian has balanced its budget for the past six years, it's facing a number of financial pressures down the road, he said.
The age 20 to 24 population in northeastern Ontario is projected to decline by 19 per cent by 2023, and that's bad news for the university sector, especially in undergraduate programs.
“Half of our students come from northeastern Ontario, and we project that undergraduate enrolment will decline starting next year,” Giroux said.
The province is creating three new university campuses in Southern Ontario, and considering a Francophone university in Toronto. Many provincial grants have also been frozen for a decade or more.
While Laurentian received millions in philanthropic and government investments last year, those dollars are earmarked for specific projects, Giroux said.
With the aforementioned investments, the university is creating new programs and putting up new buildings, and that increases its operating costs.
“We're being proactive now so we can sustain balanced budgets in the future,” Giroux said. “These voluntary offers are one of a series of steps we've been taking for awhile as a university to ensure its long-term sustainability.”
The university has worked closely with LUSU to offer the attrition packages.
“One of the reasons we would have approved this going to our members is this is voluntary,” said LUSU president Tom Fenske.
“If people choose to take it, they are free to choose to take it and enjoy their retirement or their next stage of their life, and if they're not, then they are not pressured into leaving.”
Laurentian has a large population of workers who are approaching retirement age, he said. With the early retirement offers, people will leave over a longer period of time, and “institutional memory” will be retained.
Fenske said his only concern could have been the people who remain at the university being overworked as a result of the workforce being trimmed, but he said this has been adequately addressed with Laurentian.
In some cases, the university will likely have to replace the people who are leaving, Fenske said.
