Casual staff at Australian universities are complaining that their employers short-change them millions of dollars a year via regular underpayment practices.
A parliamentary inquiry into the unlawful underpayment of workers was alerted on Feb. 22 that over nine in ten casual workers at the University of Sydney did not receive compensation for carrying out a certain amount of work during the second semester in 2020.
Siobhan Irving from Casualised, Unemployed & Precarious Uni Workers (CUPUW), a network of university staff with unstable jobs, said university managers constantly turned a deaf ear, refuted and warded off blame when casual employees expressed concerns over being underpaid.
“The current system simply does not work. It relies on casuals fighting tooth and nail for years on end, with little incentive for university managers to change their practices,” she said.
Staff are calling on universities to discard the practice of piece rates in which casuals receive payments based on the amount of work they finish rather than the time they spend to complete it.
They also urge universities to conduct frequent, independent audits to ensure that the payments casual workers receive correspond with the number of hours of work they complete.
Representatives from the University of New England, Melbourne University, RMIT, Monash University and La Trobe University admitted that underpayment incidents had occurred at their institutions.
Affected past and current staff from the five universities were receiving back-payments after the institutions had discovered the problem via their own audits and proceeded with settling the underpayments.
Brigid Haywood, the vice-chancellor of New England University, told the Senate Economics References Committee that while casual employees were necessary for universities, they should not constitute over 30 percent of the whole labour force.
“The extent to which universities use casual staff is unique to Australia ... we have to balance what is desirable for a certain cohort of staff (with workforce need),” she said.
Early Childhood Sector Also Affected
Meanwhile, the committee also listened to the accounts of early childhood educators who consistently missed out on superannuation because their employers failed to pay it and the consequential impacts on their financial future.An anonymous witness working at a childcare centre in Lithgow in New South Wales said she felt betrayed when finding out that her employer did not transfer the payment as shown on her payslip to her super account.
United Workers Union officer Melinda Bolton said the above employer had undergone liquidation, and the impacted staff might never get back the amount of super owed to them.
Labor senator Jess Walsh remarked that too many employers did not treat employee superannuation with the right attitude.
“Too often, the (tax office) lets them get away with it, but this is someone’s retirement at stake,” she said.
“We need a strong super system that makes employers do the right thing. We need a strong system that gives workers real power to get their stolen super back.”
