In the latest wage theft scandal to hit Australian universities, Macquarie University has admitted to underpaying mostly casual staff $1,913,000 between January 2017 and the end of 2023.
These underpayments impact an estimated 3191 staff and this announcement adds to the previously recorded 1000 staff members who were underpaid almost $700,000 in the same period.
According to the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU)), the total amount of admitted underpayments from Australian universities is on track to pass $400 million. Multiple institutions, including the University of Sydney, have set aside money in their budget to plan for these cases.
The union is calling for a federal parliamentary inquiry to investigate the cause of these underpayments. The government has passed legislation criminalising wage theft but this has not yet been applied to any university.
NTEU National President Dr Alison Barnes said that “without an urgent federal government intervention, wage theft is sadly going to continue because university leaders think they can get away with it.”
“Despite an avalanche of wage theft incidents at almost every public university in Australia, not a single vice-chancellor has lost their job or faced any accountability,” she continued.
A Macquarie University spokesperson told Honi Soit that “following recent examples of underpayments in the tertiary education sector, Macquarie University conducted a review of professional staff payments. The review found a high level of accuracy, but also uncovered instances of staff underpayments.”
The spokesperson said that the University was working towards paying staff back the lost wages and making improvements to systems to make sure similar incidents do not occur again.
Commenting on Macquarie University self-reporting the underpayments and initiating a review, NTEU Macquarie Branch Vice-President Mahyar Pourzand stated “given the rampant wage theft across the sector, it would have been an inevitability that the regulator would come knocking.”
“In a university that has one of the highest student-to-staff ratios with a vice-chancellor on upwards of $1 million a year, I find it absolutely disgusting that our most vulnerable staff are being systematically underpaid to this extent,” he continued.
Honi Soit has reported on six other instances this year where Universities have admitted to underpaying staff due to various errors including miscalculating super, technical glitches, and misunderstanding their obligation to casual staff.
