Precarity increases threat of wage theft

Alison Barnes NTEU National President

The crisis in higher education during the COVID-19 pandemic has helped bring two scandalous and intertwined aspects of our sector out into the open – the level of insecure employment and the widespread management practice of wage theft.

As detailed on p. 4 of this issue of Connect, at least 10 Australian universities are either repaying millions of dollars to staff who have had their wages stolen, or are under investigation for wage theft breaches.

NTEU has consistently stated that the sector’s chronic reliance on casual and fixed-term employment creates the ideal environment for exploitation. The power imbalance in the relationship between employer and employee lends itself to casual and fixed-term staff being squeezed by university management in order to reduce costs and maximise profits.

The campaigning and organising by NTEU members against wage theft has involved pushing universities to undertake audits, lodging collective disputes, industrial enforcement, and surveying our casual members in August – see the results detailed on p. 6. The survey demonstrates that exploitation remains rife amongst casual staff, and widespread across the sector.

Wage theft is common not only in universities. Our investigations into private higher education providers, where almost every employee is employed insecurely, demonstrates that like our universities, wage theft is the business model of choice for employers.

Some of the worst practices evident in the survey include 44% of casually employed professional staff having been employed for more than three years, the majority of those for more than five years, and many of those employed for 10 to 15 years – as casual employees. If the work is ongoing and regular, then why haven’t these staff been converted to ongoing positions?

Probably because 93% of respondents said that they either don’t have any rights to apply for conversion, or have never been advised by their employer, about any rights to apply for conversion to non-casual employment. Across the sector there have been limited conversions by casual academic staff to ongoing positions even though a number of Enterprise Agreements contain these provisions. This lies solely at the feet of employers who fight tooth and nail to ensure that workers remain employed casually.

Over 78% of casual academic staff who responded to the survey said that they are not paid for all the hours of marking assignments out of class time; nearly 40% of respondents said that their tutorials are described as something else so they can be paid less than the full rate. Most respondents said that there are a range of tasks and activities that their employer requires them to do, for which they don’t get paid.

It is these and other injustices that we are campaigning to fix. As we all know, the level of insecure employment in higher education has a lot to do with the historical shortfalls in government funding and the reliance on international student income to prop up the system. With the international student income ‘tap’ effectively turned off due to COVID-19, and the Federal Government ignoring the sector’s crisis by denying access to JobKeeper or any meaningful rescue package, we are now seeing significant job losses at many universities. The Federal Government has abandoned universities and incentivised university management to act against their workforce.

University managements have for many years actively fought against efforts to decasualise their workforces, leaving workers across the sector facing chronic and harmful uncertainty. It is only by continuing to stand together, by building our delegate structures, growing our membership and our grassroots strength that we can make advances toward more secure jobs and use the opportunities presented to us to force management to change.