Better pay for Australia’s casual academics ‘passively resisted’

A “culture of divesting responsibility” has fuelled such “systemic” underpayment of casual academics that prosecution is the only way to change their employers’ behaviour, according to Australia’s workplace relations watchdog.

Fair work ombudsman Sandra Parker told a senate committee of her frustration at the “passive resistance” to her office’s attempts to force universities to pay their staff properly.

“Working with the universities…hasn’t been easy,” Ms Parker told an estimates hearing on Wednesday night. “There’s that culture of wanting us to leave them alone and for them to work out their own issues. The only way to get deterrence and attention to this matter across the universities is to take some of them to court”.

The University of Melbourne now faces legal action on two fronts, after the ombudsman accused its arts faculty of underpaying 14 casuals by more than A$150,000 (£86,000). The staff had allegedly been obliged to falsify their own timesheets to match variable “benchmarks” which in some cases required them to mark students’ work at a rate of 4,000 words per hour.

The university faces separate litigation over claims that it threatened not to re-employ academics who had claimed payment for extra work.

Ms Parker said it appeared that the breaches in the arts faculty had been “tacitly approved or encouraged by the university”. She regarded them as “serious contraventions” attracting fines of up to A$630,000 (£523,000) per breach – 10 times the usual penalty.

The university declined to comment on the matters before court, other than to say that staff affected by “this historical issue” had been backpaid. “Separate to the proceedings, the university is working very hard on its remediation programme which has been under way for two years,” a spokeswoman said.

“The university has publicly acknowledged and apologised to past and current employees who had been paid less than they were due for work that they had performed.”

The ombudsman’s chief counsel, Rachel Volzke, told the committee that universities had “a culture of divesting responsibility for payments [and] recording of hours” without central oversight of payments.

Ms Parker said “issue number one” for universities was to ensure their compliance with their own enterprise agreements. “There are serious governance problems across the university sector,” she told the committee.

“Their councils and boards haven’t been asking questions about it. They haven’t sought assurance that things have been done properly. I’m hoping that we’re really bringing that to their attention. I expect that nearly all of them are asking those questions now.”

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com