AI and secure work hui: Energising TEU events.

By Matt Russell, Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa | Massey University

Over the past two Fridays, I logged into two of the most energising TEU events I’ve attended in a long time. The AI Conference on 31 October and the Secure Work Hui on 7 November brought members together to strategise around two intersecting problems: the rapid adoption of AI technologies and the deepening expansion of insecure work in tertiary education.

At the AI Conference, the central message was clear: this is a political problem, not just technological. Speaker after speaker identified the same pattern: AI is being introduced not to enhance teaching, research or reduce workloads, but to patch funding gaps and cut costs. Institutions are committing to AI infrastructure without asking basic questions about academic freedom, student outcomes, environmental cost, staff workloads, privacy, or ownership of teaching materials.

Particular concern centred on the coalition government’s ‘light-touch’ approach to AI regulation. These platforms devour our intellectual labour at massive scale, yet no sector-wide protections exist to ensure educators retain ownership over the resources they create. We also explored the quiet but growing shift from AI as teaching support, to AI as a workplace management and surveillance tool. A critical point of discussion was the alternative offered by indigenous and te ao Māori frameworks for data and algorithmic sovereignty, and how TEU can learn from and support these approaches. The conclusion was unmistakable: if we don’t lead AI policy in our sector, others will shape it for us.

The following Friday, the Secure Work Hui brought a different energy, grounded in the lived reality of insecure staff. Tutors, researchers, technicians, and learning support workers shared experiences of surviving on short-term contracts, in some cases over decades, speaking of the psychological and material harm caused by long-term, structural precarity.

The Secure Work Hui involved a sustained focus on strategy. In the last third of the day, members collectively workshopped actions such as network building, identifying and tackling wage theft, challenging the prolonged use of fixed-term arrangements, adapting delegate structures for remote and insecure staff, strengthening bargaining engagement, and building a robust evidence base for a sustained, sector-wide campaign for secure work.

For me, the link between these two events is clear. The drivers of mass casualisation are the same ones allowing automation, surveillance, and outsourcing to accelerate unchecked. These are not separate fights, but two fronts in the same struggle over who shapes the future of tertiary education, and how.

I logged out of both events feeling inspired by our members who are not waiting for ‘solutions’ to drop from above. Our task is to support and harness that energy: advancing union-led AI policy, coordinating an evidence-driven campaign on precarity, and ensuring technology strengthens, rather than replaces, the staff who make education possible.

Enormous thanks to the TEU staff and volunteer organisers who made both of these events possible. I left feeling not just the weight of the challenges ahead, but the possibility of meeting them together, in union.