One Australian university pays casual academics with gift vouchers, while another avoids paying them properly by forcing them to classify teaching as an ¡°other required activity¡±, a Senate committee has heard.

Creative writing tutor Hayley Singer said she had received a gift voucher as remuneration for serving on a PhD panel at a university that she declined to name. She said that the university routinely used vouchers to pay guest lecturers and ¡°industry professionals¡±.

Dr Singer said she had sat in on meetings where management had proposed the practice and ¡°could not believe that there would be a problem with paying highly specialised people with a gift card¡±.

¡°This is how casual insecurely employed academics are treated when we bring our professionalism and expertise onto campus and into the classroom,¡± Dr Singer told the Senate¡¯s economics references committee, which is?exploring illegal underpayment across the Australian workforce. ¡°I can¡¯t pay rent, transport [or] medical bills with gift cards. Does a gift card have superannuation attached to it?¡±

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Former Monash University tutor ¡°Greg¡±, who testified to the committee under a pseudonym, said managers kept the wages bill down by ¡°coercing¡± casual staff to misclassify tutorials on their time sheets. ¡°The core function of a university¡­is being described as an ¡®other required activity¡¯,¡± he said.

He accused the university of ¡°changing the language around teaching¡± while maintaining its structure, form and content. ¡°That means¡­staff are not paid at all for their preparation. People are being left with only one-third of [what] they are owed, in extreme cases.¡±

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Liberal Party senator Paul Star, the committee¡¯s deputy chair, said the practice reflected on universities¡¯ services as well as their treatment of staff. ¡°I would hope that our universities are teaching substance over form, to be frank, and that should apply to the timesheets as well as critical thinking.¡±

Late last year, Monash committed to repay over A$8.6 million (?4.6 million) in unpaid wages dating back to 2014. But ¡°Greg¡± said this figure only represented underpayments that had been ¡°picked up as a mistake¡± because people had categorised tasks as ¡°other required activity¡± while describing them as ¡°tutorial¡± in the comment section of payment claim forms.

¡°[Monash is] only admitting to situations where they failed to properly coerce the staff into hiding their own wage theft,¡± he told the inquiry. ¡°It¡¯s a fraction of what staff are owed.¡±

Monash vice-chancellor Margaret Gardner told the hearing that she had initiated an institution-wide review of payments to sessional academics over six-and-a-half years, after being alerted to problems through a complaint in a single faculty. The university had also implemented a new casual staff scheduling system, boosted training on payment processes and appointed dedicated human resources staff to perform ¡°additional quality assurance checks¡±.

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Professor Gardner said that the review had been ¡°a very significant piece of work¡± involving huge numbers of staff. ¡°I think what you see in that is good faith. It¡¯s the good faith of people trying to be good employers.¡±

The National Tertiary Education Union has filed a dispute over La Trobe University¡¯s use of ¡°illegal piece rates¡± to pay casual academic employees for marking. The union believes the practice adds more than A$2 million to the A$3.5 million of historical underpayments acknowledged by the university in December.

La Trobe said its independent review had already identified ¡°an issue around marking¡± before the union lodged the dispute, with the shortfall estimated at A$2.5 million. ¡°We hope to resolve this matter and pay any affected staff as soon as possible,¡± a spokeswoman said.

The University of New England said that it had identified errors in payments to former staff now employed by its subsidiaries, in addition to some A$1.1 million in underpayments to almost 1,700 staff uncovered in 2020. ¡°That may lead to an additional payment,¡± vice-chancellor Brigid Heywood told the committee.

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john.ross@timeshighereducation.com