One year later: Staff feeling the squeeze of the hiring freeze

On January 1, 2025, a hiring freeze went into effect at the University of Alberta. While not a complete stop to all hiring, the freeze requires more steps for a job posting. At the time, the university paused any ongoing hiring processes that had not reached a verbal offer by December 31, 2024.

At the time, U of A media relations told The Gateway “the hiring freeze and associated approval process are organizational tools to control expenditures.”

The Gateway requested data on the number of people hired in the year prior to the hiring freeze compared to under the hiring freeze. The U of A media relations would not provide that data. 

Media relations said “the hiring restriction is not a freeze on all hiring but just one of many variables that might impact the number of hires at the university. Therefore, it is not possible to provide specific data.”

The Gateway then asked for any information media relations could provide around how the effectiveness of the freeze is being measured. 

Media relations did not provide any information, but said “the hiring restriction is in response to ongoing financial constraints, ensuring that hiring is either critical to teaching, operations, safety and/or compliance with regulations, or that it has clear connections to strategic priorities and key initiatives such as student success and learning.”

Hiring freeze is increasing burden on staff, NASA president says

Quinn Benders, the president of the Non-Academic Staff Association (NASA), had concerns when the freeze went into effect. NASA represents about 6,000 U of A employees, which includes building service workers, researchers, lab assistants, nurses, library personnel, and administrative and clerical staff. 

Benders told The Gateway in a recent interview that they’ve seen a reduction of about 200 staff positions under the freeze. 

“That has led to offloading those positions to the remainder of staff, which is about a three per cent reduction in total staff complement,” he explained. “Which doesn’t sound like too much, but this is also under the backdrop of staff undergoing massive cuts since 2019.”

During academic restructuring between 2019 and 2022, the university reduced about 1,050 staff positions. Benders says they have recovered some, but not all of those positions. 

He added that the U of A’s goal to increase enrolment to 60,000 students has increased the burden on staff as well.

“We’ve continually had increased burden and demand on supports and services our staff provide and then we’ve also, in that same amount of time, had a continuing reduction,” Benders said.

He said that the burden on staff is unsustainable. It’s led to burnout and mental health crises, as well as longer wait times for “critical supports, maintenance, and generally just a degraded campus environment.”

Benders said that this shouldn’t be framed just as an administrative issue. 

“Research at the U of A doesn’t happen without research accountants, grant facilitators, ethics officers, technicians, library workers, and the hiring freeze cripples our abilities to support research, teaching, and student experience that the university claims that it wants to prioritize.”

Academic staff concerned about the future of their departments, Smitka says

Kristine Smitka is a lecturer in the department of English and film studies and the vice-president of the Association of Academic Staff at the U of A (AASUA). AASUA represents about 4,000 academic staff, including researchers, faculty, and academic teaching staff.

She said that “the hiring freeze is just the latest phase of the university, basically not hiring people to replace folks who retire.”

Smitka said that every time someone retires, the university replaces that job with someone on a short-term contract. 

She said that academic teaching staff on short-term contracts are teaching about 50 per cent of undergraduate courses.

“I would say it’s part of a pattern that’s been going on now for quite a few years, and I think a lot of the academic staff are feeling stress at the level of the department,” she said. 

Some of the conversations she says departments have been having are around whether or not they can find sufficient supervisors for graduate students and fewer undergraduate students having the opportunity to study with research staff.

“So it means that often academic staff feel quite stressed about the future of their departments, their disciplines here at the institution because they don’t see that renewal in the future of the department,” she explained. 

Faculty are concerned about the impact on the quality of teaching. Smitka said that sometimes teaching staff are thrown into their teaching assignments only weeks before the semester starts. 

She said that she understands the fiscal pressures the university is facing, however she feels there’s a lack of transparency in regards to how effective some of the cost-saving strategies are. 

“I don’t think AASUA is completely satisfied with the answers we’re getting about where [the university’s] resources are going if they’re not going to frontline teaching and research staff.”