Late last year, The ABC ran an alarming article on the widespread wage theft taking place at Australia’s universities, with the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) claiming “wage theft [was]… rampant across Australian universities” after three quarters of academic staff surveyed claiming they were being underpaid:
NTEU carried out a survey of 2,174 professional and academic staff at every university except Charles Darwin University.
Of the academic staff, 78.4 per cent of respondents said they were not paid for all hours of marking outside of class time…
Yesterday, a Senate inquiry heard from union representatives who said wage theft is “embedded” in the business model of academic institutions:
Gabe Gooding, the national assistant secretary of the National Tertiary Education Union, told the inquiry that underpayment was “embedded in the business model of Australian universities”…
She said the union had received “more than 3,000 calls” to the union about underpayment within seven days last year.
The inquiry also heard that some academics have had their hours cut after they publicly blew the whistle wage theft.
Meanwhile, Australian vice-chancellors are the highest paid in the world:
The typical vice-chancellor at an Australian university earns in excess of $1 million a year.
This is another prime example of how Australia’s universities have shredded their social contract. The list is long:
- Links to the CCP;
- Over-reliance on international students and the networks behind this recruitment;
- Collapsing entry and teaching standards;
- Persecution of whistle-blowers like Drew Pavlou and Gerd Schroder-Turk;
- Casualisation of academic staff and systemic wage theft from these same staff;
- Growth of well-paid non-academic staff at the expense of academics; and
- Putting dollars ahead of lives throughout the pandemic by lobbying to open Australia’s borders.
The sector now prioritises ‘higher earning’ by operating degree mills over ‘higher learning’ via providing a quality education to Australians and lifting the nation’s productive potential.
Our universities now operate like the very worst blood-sucking and rent-seeking corporations.
