The CSIRO will make 41 of its South Australian staff redundant by June next year, a union analysis of CSIRO management statistics shows.

They are part of nearly 900 jobs to be axed across the country before the end of the financial year.

As of June this year, the CSIRO employed 332 staff in South Australia.

According to the report, more than one in five CSIRO staff will have lost their jobs in 2013-14 and 2014-15, with more than 500 jobs cut in the past financial year.

The majority of the South Australian cuts are to jobs in research support, food and nutrition, and management.

SA researchers in food and nutrition have been involved in the development of the CSIRO Total Wellbeing Diet and research into colorectal cancer.

Premier Jay Weatherill told InDaily this morning he was furious about the cuts.

“This just flies in the face of the very things that we need to be doing to create a flourishing knowledge economy within our nation – and, in particular, in South Australia,” he said.

“They are precisely the high end jobs which would assist in the transformation of the Australian economy, in particular the South Australian economy.”

“The opportunities in health and bioscience (and) the opportunities in food – all of these require us to value-add and innovate.”

The job cuts constitute a reduction of more than 10 per cent of the CSIRO’s South Australian workforce.

The most recent redundancies are in response to federal budget cuts of $111 million in the May budget and an internal restructure earlier this year.

Weatherill said he would lobby the federal government to reverse the funding cuts.

The deepest job cuts across the country are to research support and management roles, followed by the mineral resources and energy, land and water and digital productivity sectors.

Most of those to be made redundant are scientists, engineers and research project officers.

According to CSIRO Staff Association Secretary Sam Popovski, all of the South Australian staff have been notified of their redundancy, or have already been terminated.

“Those redundancies will be proceeding now,” he said.

Last week, the union released another report, showing just 58 per cent of staff would recommend the organisation as a good place to work, down from 77 per cent two years ago.

“Restoring funding is about restoring confidence and morale,” said Popovski.

He warned Australia was likely losing some of its best scientific talent to other countries.

“Science is a global industry and these people are looking to continue their career – they are looking overseas.

“We don’t have any statistics on how many of our scientists who are leaving CSIRO … are getting jobs overseas (however) it wouldn’t surprise me to find that a significant number of CSIRO scientists could readily be employed overseas.”

The report also revealed less than one third of staff believed senior management had a clear vision for the future of the organisation.

Popovski said newly appointed CSIRO chief executive Larry Marshall had “an enormous task ahead of him to arrest the decline in funding – whether that’s an increase in funding from government, or increased investment from industry”.

InDaily has contacted the CSIRO for a response.