Last year, the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) revealed that more than three quarters of academic staff surveyed across Australia’s university sector were being underpaid, with “wage theft… rampant across Australian universities”:
The 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…
“The survey confirms what everybody’s known and long suspected — that wage theft is rampant across Australian universities,” NTEU President Dr Alison Barnes said.
“We’re looking at really high numbers of casual staff that are being exploited and this has a detrimental impact on both staff and students.”
Now NTEU alleges that RMIT University has engaged in significant underpayment of casual academic staff dating back to 2014, with its allegation relating to staff being underpaid when marking student exams and assignments. The NTEU estimates that the amount involved could be well above $15 million:
Ten of RMIT’s schools have been implicated in the dispute, which centres on casual staff being underpaid between $10 and $20 an hour when marking student assignments and exams, in a multitude of individual cases that stretch back to 2014…
Institutions including the University of Melbourne and La Trobe [have also been] caught up in underpayment claims and investigations in recent months…
RMIT University has a highly casualised workforce: 5688 people out of a total staff of 9510 were listed as fixed term and casual in its 2020 annual report.
Meanwhile, Australian vice-chancellors are the highest paid in the world:
Australia’s university vice-chancellors dine on $1m pay.
Note above that RMIT’s vice-chancellor received $1.2 million in remuneration in 2019.
Universities also enjoyed a massive broad-based rise in funding over the prior decade:
University funding booms.
Just another example of how Australia’s universities have shredded their social contract.
