Just about every university in the country has dudded staff on pay. The Fair Work Ombudsman says it “has engaged with at least 38 institutions” since 2022 – all up, there are but 44. And in a handful of matters the Federal Country have pinged managements for underpaying people.
The FWO reports it “secured” $102m for 65,000 staff at four universities 2022-2025, but this does not include all reported underpayments, including errors in superannuation, across the system over the last 15 years.
The National Tertiary Education Union puts underpayments at $311m and has long called what is generally inadvertent incompetence, “wage theft.” And now it wants to investigate cases, under the 2023 “closing the loopholes” Fair Work Amendment Act, which created a criminal offence for intentionally underpaying people.
In a submission to a Senate committee inquiry, the NTEU calls for unions to have the power to investigate intentional wage theft according to the Act, because the FWO will never have the resources to chase every case. And the union wants financial penalties in cases of conviction to go to the union, “improving compliance and in creating a stronger culture of deterrence.”
Which management representative the Australian Higher Education Industrial Association calls “preposterous in the extreme,” arguing, “deliberate and intentional underpayment of Australian workers should properly be a criminal offence” and that the Act is “appropriately constructed to target intentional and dishonest conduct.”
AHEIA also kicks up at the union’s use of the term “wage theft.”
“The root cause of underpayments in the sector lies in the complexity and ambiguity in enterprise agreements and awards and the uncertainty this causes, not deliberate conduct. Recent cases demonstrates that even courts and regulators encounter significant difficulty in interpreting these provisions to determine the entitlements owing to employees.”
The FWO also advised the Senate committee that, “in practice, the term ‘wage theft’ is often applied broadly to a range of underpayment scenarios, from accidental or inadvertent errors (including genuine mistakes about award coverage, classification, or payroll systems) through to serious, systemic and deliberate conduct.”
The Senate committee is due to report on June 15.