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