After the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) called upon the federal parliament to inquire into university wage theft, a staggering $2 million worth of wages was admittedly withheld from Macquarie University.
The university itself confessed to underpaying their staff in a wage scandal set to engulf the Australian institution.
However, the issue is looming to stand even greater with the NTEU tracking the underpayment of university staff to surpass $400 million.
“University wage theft is a national disgrace that demands a federal parliamentary inquiry to stamp out the rotten culture that’s allowing this behaviour to flourish,” states NTEU National President, Dr Alison Barnes.
With a total of 3,191 staff who work on a casual basis, Macquarie University has informed their professional employees that between January 2017 to the end of 2023, they were underpaid approximately $1,913. This is in addition to another incident where 1,033 casual academics had $674,000 worth of wage theft reported over a six-year period that was just announced.
As it stands, the NTEU has raised continuous concerns regarding Macquarie University and their continued poor treatment of casual staff, going so far as to criticise Macquarie’s management of its own investigations into the underpayment scandal.
“Macquarie University is boasting that they initiated this review on their own accord,” states the NTEU Macquarie Branch Vice-President, Mahyar Pourzand. “But given the rampant wage theft across the sector, it would have been an inevitability that the regulator would come knocking.”
“In a university that has one of the highest student-to-staff ratios with a vice-chancellor on upwards of $1 million a year, I find it absolutely disgusting that our most vulnerable staff are being systematically underpaid to this extent.”
This stands as a shocking revelation as Dr Alison Barnes also states that, “despite an avalanche of wage theft incidents at almost every public university in Australia, not a single vice-chancellor has lost their job or faced any accountability.”
Furthermore, she states that “once again, we see wages being stolen – the toxic twin of insecure employment – from casually employed university staff. We must end the insecure work crisis, which has left two in every three university staff without a permanent job, while fixing the broken governance model.”
