Wage theft: Our universities’ dirty little secret

Dr Damien Cahill NTEU NSW Division Secretary

It has taken a pandemic to expose the dirty secret at the heart of Australia’s universities: they are almost completely reliant on the work of precariously employed staff.

Encouraged by decades of federal government policy settings, university chiefs have leant into the international student market as the only source of revenue growth. At the same time they have piled into precarious employment as a risk mitigation and cost minimisation strategy. About 70% of staff employed in Australian universities are on insecure contracts, either fixed-term or casual.

Before the COVID pandemic, university employers were at pains to downplay the extent of casualisation. Staffing numbers were officially reported on a full-time equivalent basis, understating the actual numbers of casual employees.

But the COVID crisis laid bare the consequences of casualisation for society as a whole. Without long-term employment rights, households who depended on casual work lost their incomes overnight. And lacking any entitlements to paid sick leave, causals faced a terrible choice between paying the bills and protecting themselves and their colleagues by not fronting for work if they contracted COVID.

So too in universities. When international student fee income declined as a result of the COVID-related travel restrictions, casuals were the first to lose their jobs. But rather than exit meekly, casuals around the country showed their anger and frustration. Through social media, online actions and in Parliamentary inquiries, casual staff drew public attention to Australian universities’ dirty little secret of rampant insecure employment.

Since then, the Fair Work Ombudsman has announced it is investigating 14 universities for potential underpayment of staff. Already UNSW and the Universities of Sydney and Melbourne have owned up to millions of dollars in historic underpayments.

Fair Work Ombudsman Sandra Parker even addressed the higher education regulator, TEQSA, on the matter. TEQSA chief Professor Peter Coaldrake took aim at university management. The traditional management position of ‘there’s no problem here’ and ‘we’ve got it under control’, he suggested, is no longer acceptable.

Underpayments, or wage theft, arise not only because of administrative errors, as uni managements often claim, but because casuals regularly go unpaid for much of the work they perform, such as marking, preparation and student consultation. These are not isolated incidents, but systemic. Yet university chiefs continue to act as if there is no problem.

Indicative of this was the recent mass rejection for conversion to ongoing contracts of thousands of causal staff by university managers. At Western Sydney Uni, for example over 1100 casual staff received personalised emails about their eligibility for conversion. Not one received an offer of secure employment.

Even more galling for some staff was receiving incomplete pro-forma rejection letters with the words ‘HOWEVER REASON’ included to justify the decision. A better demonstration of the lack of respect for casual university staff would be difficult to find.

As most casuals will tell you, much of the work they perform is actually ongoing in nature. Student enrolments fluctuate very little year-on-year. Whether it is teaching first year tutorials, or working in a student enquiry call-centre, there is a large of core of university work that is very stable, but done by workers on insecure contracts.

This matters because it affects the quality of education provided to the next generation of students. Having our teachers and student support workers subsisting on the smell of an oily rag is no way to run a university. Neither is forcing them to pay for their own IT equipment, denying them paid sick leave, excluding them from collegial governance processes and not paying them for student consultation time or feedback on assessments.

More and more, casual university staff are treated like gig workers. They are undervalued, and their contribution is disrespected.

The solutions are obvious, and simple. University chiefs have demonstrated they will not voluntarily convert casuals to secure forms of employment, so Enterprise Agreements will need to change to force them to do so. And the Federal Government needs to back this in with an injection of funds. It is an investment not only in the job security of tens of thousands of university staff, but in our collective future. ◆

Dr Damien Cahill is NTEU NSW Division Secretary

This article was originally published in the Australian Financial Review.