NTEU recovering thousands in underpayment for casual academic members at RMIT

NTEU RMIT Branch members are running a campaign for the hundreds of RMIT casual academics who have not been paid the correct Academic Judgement Rate for marking over the last six years. Thousands of dollars have already been recovered for members.

Two years ago, NTEU RMIT Branch members learned from a staff survey that casual academic staff across numerous RMIT schools weren’t being paid the appropriate Academic Judgement rate for marking. After approaching various schools about backpay, and launching a campaign earlier this year, the Branch launched an industrial dispute and is demanding that RMIT pay back stolen wages to all affected staff. With the help of the NTEU, some individual underpayment cases have already been settled. Casual academic and NTEU member Andrew Linden said:

‘Systemic wage theft is a huge issue in [higher education]. With the help of

Rhidian Thomas at the NTEU, I recovered nearly 10K for underpaid marking since 2014. Other sessionals are owed much, much more. I hope that through this campaign RMIT members will be able to recover those underpayments. It definitely pays to be an NTEU member.’ Since then, a significant amount of evidence has also been gathered via a website created by the NTEU’s campaign team, with hundreds of past and present RMIT casuals sharing their experiences of Academic Judgement wage theft. In some cases, the wage bill that casuals have accrued exceeds $40,000.

In a recent meeting with RMIT management, the Union gave an overview of this evidence, which indicates Academic Judgement Rate underpayment has been perpetrated in at least eleven of RMIT’s 16 Academic Schools.

After securing a written assurance from RMIT that staff who participated in the dispute would not be subjected to any adverse action, NTEU shared thousands of pages of this evidence, including a large number of member statements, which demonstrated the breadth and systemic nature of the underpayments. The NTEU is formally in dispute with RMIT under the current Enterprise Agreement, and has put the University on notice that the Union will consider launching legal action on behalf of members if RMIT does not appropriately investigate and redress the incidence of academic judgement wage theft across all of RMIT’s academic schools. A second meeting will occur soon and the team wants as many members as possible to attend, to show RMIT management that casuals are standing together to fight back against wage theft. In a recent interview on ABC AM, NTEU Victorian Division Assistant Secretary, Sarah Roberts said:

‘Universities are structurally arranged to facilitate and grease the wheels of wage theft. They do it because they know that most casuals won’t come forward because they’re scared of losing their jobs. Unis want to save money and they simply think they can get away with it – and up until now they’ve been right. But this ends now.’

If you know someone who worked at RMIT as a casual academic over the last 6 years, please send them this link. They could be owed thousands of dollars: nteu.info/underpayment

Find out more at www.nteu.org.au/rmit/ academic_judgement_underpayment