Union says more than 97,000 university staff have been underpaid

A new report has revealed almost 100 thousand university staff across the country have been underpaid in wage theft cases.

Transcript

00:00 This report is from the National Tertiary Education Union and it really reveals that

00:07 97,555 staff collectively have suffered wage theft of almost $159 million from 2009.

00:18 The majority of these underpayments happened since 2014 and they cover some 55 incidents

00:25 across 32 institutions around the country and the union says that the true figure of

00:32 exploitation is likely to be much higher than that $159 million mark and that is because

00:39 there are currently 8 cases involving wage theft that are currently potentially worth

00:46 millions of dollars that are still ongoing.

00:49 The union leaders say that this report really does lay bare the exact depths of systemic

00:56 underpayments across Australian universities and it really is a wake up call showing the

01:01 rampant casualisation of the workforce and its effects as well.

01:07 And what we do know is that Victoria leads the way when it comes to wage theft in universities

01:13 totalling some $75 million, New South Wales is behind that with $65 million and Tasmania

01:19 is $11 million.

01:22 And most of this underpayment issue happens from teacher misclassification but it can

01:28 also be a factor involving unpaid overtime as well.

01:32 The union says that this is the second time that it's calculated all of these figures

01:37 since February came up with about $83 million but it was clear that they needed to do their

01:43 sums again because more information had come to light pushing that exploitation amount

01:48 up to almost $159 million.

01:51 And we know that the federal government has this universities accord at the moment which

01:55 is a panel of experts tasked with looking at how to overhaul the universities sector.

02:01 The federal education minister Jason Clare has already nominated governance reform to

02:06 tackle wage theft as a key priority and the union says that this report shows just how

02:13 widespread it is, it's a damning indictment it says of the current governance model and

02:18 shows how workers have to be urgently protected against more exploitation.

02:22 [BLANK_AUDIO]