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University staff say they have been blacklisted, given less work and removed from internal email lists after speaking out on underpayment and wage theft.
Multiple academics and teachers testified before a Senate inquiry on Wednesday that is investigating underpayment and casualisation in Australian workplaces.
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".
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She said the union understood that "close to 40% of public universities" had been "implicated in underpayments or known to be undertaking audits".
Gooding also told the inquiry that some staff at private education providers had been asked to get an Australian Business Number (ABN) and be paid as sole traders, so they would not receive superannuation contributions.
© Photograph: Bloomberg/Bloomberg via Getty ImagesUniversity staff say they have been removed from internal email lists and given less work after their comments on underpayment gained media attention.
She said the union had received "more than 3,000 calls" to the union about underpayment within seven days last year.
In November, a survey of casual staff at the University of Sydney found 84% performed unpaid work over six weeks - the equivalent of each staff member "working close to one day (6.6 hours) unpaid every week".
Dr Ellyse Fenton from the University of Queensland told the inquiry that her hours were cut, and she was removed from "internal communications" after she spoke up about underpayment.
"I have definitely stopped receiving work at the department I worked at, where I had worked for 13 years, after I appeared in national news media last year," she said. "It is impossible to know if that was the cause of the loss of work ... as a causal [you can be] asked not to come back. I can't know for sure.
"What I do know, is that when that story came out in August last year. I was not doing the teaching work . but I was employed to supervise an honours student. A few weeks after that story came out, I was removed from all the internal communications, the email lists."
Dr Yaegan Doran from the University of Sydney said that casual staff often felt scared to speak up about underpayment because their hours could be cut with no warning.
"I have a lot of colleagues who very suddenly had less work than they did, for many, many years, after becoming a bit more well known after speaking out," he told the inquiry.
Doran said that one colleague had been approached to speak before the inquiry, but withdrew.
"They are an international student who is also a casual," he said. "Their tutorial hours were reclassified as administration hours a couple of years ago, which leads to a third of pay, depending on the classification. They were suddenly given no work whatsoever.
"When asked if they would want to speak today, they weren't going to risk it whatsoever. This is unfortunately super common."
In its submission to the inquiry, the University of New South Wales said that the "relative complexity" of the enterprise agreements created a "risk of underpayments that may inadvertently occur".
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But Dr Liam Kane from UNSW said this was not an excuse for "systemic, decades-long wage theft".
Kane said that the university was "a large sophisticated organisation that should be able to get their accounting right".
UNSW has already launched a review "to identify casual staff affected by payment issues" in the business school. "UNSW has made payments to all casual academic staff identified as having been underpaid to date," the university said in June.
"The university is now conducting a comprehensive review of all payments to casual academic staff employed in the Business School back to January 2014 to identify any other affected staff. The university is being assisted by Deloitte and other external expert advice in the review."
Last year, a spokeswoman for the University of Sydney that beyond the casual review, it was "not currently aware of any other data or evidence to suggest our academic staff are frequently working hours beyond what they are contracted to do."
Gooding said the overall problem was the inadequate funding of universities.
"As the sector becomes more casualised there are less and less ongoing jobs," she said.