Macquarie University has admitted underpaying staff almost $2 million in the latest wage theft scandal to engulf an Australian institution.
The National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) has called for a federal parliamentary inquiry into university wage theft, with the national total of underpayments now on track to pass $400 million.
Macquarie University has told staff that 3191 mostly casually employed professional employees were underpaid $1,913,000 between January 2017 and the end of 2023.
This is on top of the previously announced $674,000 wage theft incident affecting 1033 casual academics at Macquarie over a similar six-year period.
The NTEU has continuously raised concerns over treatment of casual staff at Macquarie and criticised management's own reviews into underpayments.
NTEU Macquarie Branch Vice-President Mahyar Pourzand said:
"Macquarie University is boasting that they initiated this review on their own accord, but given the rampant wage theft across the sector, it would have been an inevitability that the regulator would come knocking.
"In a university that has one of the highest student-to-staff ratios with a vice-chancellor on upwards of $1 million a year, I find it absolutely disgusting that our most vulnerable staff are being systematically underpaid to this extent."
NTEU National President Dr Alison Barnes said:
"University wage theft is a national disgrace that demands a federal parliamentary inquiry to stamp out the rotten culture that's allowing this behaviour to flourish.
"Despite an avalanche of wage theft incidents at almost every public university in Australia, not a single vice-chancellor has lost their job or faced any accountability.
"Once again we see wages being stolen – the toxic twin of insecure employment – from casually employed university staff.
"We must end the insecure work crisis, which has left two in every three university staff without a permanent job, while fixing the broken governance model.
"Without an urgent federal government intervention, wage theft is sadly going to continue because university leaders think they can get away with it."
