Unsubstantiated “wage theft” accusations are a threat to the “psychosocial safety” of the university staff and executives who oversee payroll compliance, an Australian parliamentary inquiry has heard.
The Australian Higher Education Industrial Association said historical underpayments in the sector – so far valued at over A$218 million (?106 million) by the fair work ombudsman and closer to A$400 million by the National Tertiary Education Union – had resulted from “system complexity and errors” rather than “deliberate dishonesty”.
“If the universities are doing something wrong and it is dishonest, call it for what it is,” executive director Craig Laughton told the Senate’s Education and Employment Committee, which is enquiring into university governance. “But if we’re genuinely trying to do the right thing, please look after our people trying to pay [staff] the right sums of money.
“Under the Fair Work Act, wage theft – that’s a term that gets bandied around very loosely – requires proof of criminal intent. Genuine mistakes or accidents are specifically excluded. For an underpayment to be considered wage theft, the underpayment must be deliberate and dishonest, not a genuine mistake.”
Laughton said the “root causes” of the underpayments were “highly complex” enterprise agreements, “legacy” payroll constraints and “antiquated” award provisions, including descriptors.
“Imagine a job description from 25 years ago, today,” he told the committee. “How does a payroll person interpret that? Are you in the right category or class to be paid? That’s difficult, right?
“If you overlay a governance structure on a system that’s broken…you’re going to have a whole lot of reporting and monitoring going up to your audit risk committees. The question is, how do we fix it? My plea today is that we take a step back and try to address some of the root causes impacting on this in an unemotive fashion, so that we can make some genuine progress.”
Committee member Corinne Mulholland, a Queensland senator from the governing Labor party, said that some underpayment was deliberate. She cited recent evidence of casual academics being rostered on for two hours and paid for 90 minutes.
“It’s not just a complicated system in the back end for poor payroll staff,” Mulholland told the committee. “There are also genuine underpayment [issues] – call it wage theft, because it is – genuine underpayment stuff going on in the sector as well.”
Laughton said it was “statistically” impossible to rule out deliberate underpayments, but insisted it was not systematic. “No one sits there and goes, ‘this is our business model to rip people off’. I am absolutely, totally unaware of anybody in our sector saying they’ve been directed to do this.”
He said universities were genuinely motivated to fix the problem, citing attendance at information sessions organised by his association every second Friday afternoon. They included advice on interpreting award provisions, identifying historical underpayments and rectifying them. “If you can get 125 people turning up to a session every second Friday, something’s resonating.”
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