A further 20 long-term staff will go from private health insurer AHM by May 22 as part of another round of redundancies.
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The Wollongong-founded insurer was acquired by Medibank Private in 2009 and subsequent restructuring led to several redundancies.
The federal government's sell-off of Medibank Private last November sparked concerns around further cuts, and United Services Union Illawarra organiser Rudy Oppitz said those fears had been realised.
"When Medibank took over AHM they gave assurances that they would not only keep the current AHM employees in Wollongong; they also indicated that there would be future employment opportunities here as part of their plan to build a bigger and better AHM," he said.
"The sad fact is that they've been slowly reducing the number of employees since they've taken over, with around 180 now left. That will fall further to 160 after the 20 redundancies announced on Tuesday."
Mr Oppitz said Medibank had advised the union of its plans to implement redundancies last week, but had refused to confirm numbers, nor which staff would be affected.
"We asked for the opportunity for people to put up their hand and take voluntary redundancies but that was refused," he said.
"The 20 employees who have been made redundant are all administrative staff - those who deal with the processing of member claims - and the majority of those are long-term staff with 10 to 20-plus years' experience in the industry."
Mr Oppitz said the union would be holding discussions with its Wollongong members on Wednesday morning to decide upon possible industrial action.
"Members are very angry about what has taken place because of the lack of transparency over the redundancy selection process," he said.
"The union will seek its members' advice on whether or not they want to pursue the issue about selection criteria in the Industrial Relations Commission."
Throsby MP Stephen Jones warned last year the government's decision to privatise Medibank would lead to further job cuts at AHM.
"The community has every right to be angry that the privatisation of Medibank has indeed led to job losses in the region," he said.
"We were promised that AHM had a bright future - but that future is not looking so bright now."
Head of external affairs for Medibank and AHM, Mikala Hehir, confirmed that 20 employees had been made redundant.
"Over the last few years we have invested in improved technology so that members, hospitals and providers can interact with us in a faster and more efficient way, lessening manual processing," she said.
"This has meant we no longer need the same number of people to do manual, back-office processing and are reducing the number of employees in our AHM back-office team."
