AFTER two years of failed enterprise bargaining, union members at Southern Cross University said they had no other option but to cause unprecedented disruption at the Lismore campus.

Potentially the start of rolling strikes, yesterday's 24 hours of industrial action left the university switchboard unattended for the first time. Classes were cancelled while staff braved heavy rain to picket the campus' two entrances.

National Tertiary Education Union branch secretary and postgraduate student union representative, Craig Wilson, said the union was committed to a 3% pay rise over the term of its four-year enterprise agreement to keep pace with inflation and cost of living.

"We will not budge on a sub-standard pay offer," Mr Wilson said.

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"Management has offered an increase of 2% but this will place our academic staff as the worst placed staff in Australia with the exception of Federation University in Ballarat.

"There is a good possibility that the university might offer staff a non-union agreement and we will campaign against that."

"The resignation of the Workplace Relations Manager in recent weeks is telling. Several staff have left to take up positions at other institutions where they are treated with respect. Others have literally left in disgust, choosing to leave their jobs rather than work in an organisation where morale is so low," she said.

"While staff struggle under the increased workloads left by many redundancies over the last couple of years, the Vice Chancellor insists on expanding his building program at the expense of staff and students."

"You can't put students first by putting staff last," he said.

"We think the university is wasting a lot of money on extravagant capital works. In order to prop up courses on the Gold Coast, there has been staff redundancies here. Increasingly, we are seeing students which have enrolled in internal courses shoved to online courses as a way of saving on staff."

SCU management wrote in its statement: "The pay increases offered by the university are above CPI. The university continues to offer to meet with the NTEU to resolve the outstanding issue, which is the quantum of pay increases."