Long-standing professors walked off the job at Deakin University's Warrnambool campus saying they feel "taken advantage of" amid eight months of unsuccessful enterprise bargaining. It comes after a push by the National Tertiary Education Union to take industrial action by striking for 24 hours on Thursday, July 20 after an unfruitful motion was passed by union members in June calling on management to make significant progress by the end of the month. A total of 16 professional staff and 13 academic staff are participating at the city's campus, including union member and associate professor Julianne Lynch who's taught at the university for 20 years. "I feel like I'm running around from project to project, task to task tapping things along and working out of hours, working unpaid hours," she told The Standard. "Previously I would've been happy to do that. I love the work - it's good work and it's work for the common good, but I feel taken advantage of because I don't think the Deakin management has really respected this whole process and it's come to crunch time. "I don't want people starting to work at the university next year thinking it's normal to have poor life-work balance and thinking that's the way things are because it shouldn't be the way a successful university operates. "And Deakin university ranks first in Victoria for student satisfaction because the staff work hard to produce very strong outcomes." IN OTHER NEWS Associate professor Max Kelly said she wanted to see the de-casualisation of the workforce. "We've had quite a reduction in ongoing staff numbers," she said. "We employ people on an hourly rate to do non-secure work, it's a very difficult environment to work in. "... Really good staff members with great research are coming in and being employed as casuals. That should be a short-term fix - they should be able to see career progression that enables them to contribute to Deakin and their academic career. "At the moment there's an incredible amount of insecure work and that's not sustainable for anybody." Doctor Emma Charlton said the action being taken was for the benefit of the students. "We don't take this decision lightly and we very much care about students and their outcomes," she said. "It's a challenging decision to take but it's the only decision we can make to make sure our students can continue to achieve such strong outcomes, but it's not sustainable." Deakin University declined to comment. Our journalists work hard to provide local, up-to-date news to the community. This is how you can access our trusted content: