Australian unis rob staff, splash on Big 4 consultants, hoard billions

There is wage theft on an industrial scale at Australia’s public universities, while the Big 4 consultants charge huge fees to support mismanagement. James Guthrie And Adam Lucas with story.

The $400 million scandal affecting nearly every public university in the country reveals a dysfunctional system gutted by institutional ideology and administrative impunity.

Over the past decade, at least 28 universities have been found to have systematically underpaid staff, casual workers, fixed-term employees and even those who were ‘voluntarily’ laid off. The Fair Work Ombudsman is already

It recovered more than $218 million for more than 110,000 workers.

But this is just the beginning.

These are not marginal payroll oversights. These are intentional, industrial-scale acts of underpayment driven by a business model that views training as a revenue stream and staff as disposable costs. Moreover, while thousands of academics and professional staff are dying without receiving the salaries they are legally owed, university administrators are busy paying themselves million-dollar salaries and pouring billions of dollars into real estate development and cash investments.

wrong priorities

Paying staff correctly should have been the first and foremost obligation of university leadership. But instead of prioritizing the pay of people teaching students and producing research, senior managers have poured public money into vanity projects, speculative real estate and bloated executive teams.

$72 million has been refunded to more than 25,000 underpaid staff at the University of Melbourne. Wage theft liabilities at UNSW reach $70.8 million. The University of Sydney was $23 million in debt; Another $18 million to Monash. The University of Wollongong was forced to pay $6.6 million to temporary workers and was slapped with a ‘contrition payment’ for good measure.

Excuses? Faulty systems. Awards are confusing ‘Unintentional’ mistakes. Such claims fall flat under scrutiny. The underpayments stem from a range of fraudulent practices: flawed criteria for teaching and marking, temporary staff being denied minimum shift lengths, unpaid overtime and words-per-hour measures that fail the laugh test, let alone Fair Work standards.

University funding. ANU and the commercialization of higher education

Enter the Big 4

Moreover, firms that aim to hold the system accountable (consultancies such as PwC, KPMG, Deloitte and EY) have made themselves indispensable to university governance and administration. They propose restructuring, redesign staffing models, and then get paid again to oversee their own work.

Some even offered advice on payroll systems that make missing payments easier. They are not just consultants,

they are co-architects and enablers of a rotten system they helped create.

We estimate that Australia’s 38 public universities currently spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year on consultants, sitting on multi-billion dollar investment portfolios and taking a share of international student income.

great beings

A recent audit of the finances of Australian universities by Professor John H. Howard found that universities have total assets of $110.8 billion and net assets of $74.2 billion in 2023; this includes $6.1 billion in cash and cash equivalents. But these same universities have cut more than 35,000 jobs, hundreds of courses, dozens of courses, and countless schools and disciplines in the last five years.

Throughout this spree of destruction, not a single vice-chancellor lost his job due to wage theft or the many other questionable activities in which they were involved.

Governments have done little to rein in this behavior. Whether under Labor or Coalition rule, bipartisan protection racket has shielded university administrators and their corporate advisers from serious scrutiny. There is no forensic accounting. There is no royal commission. There is no criminal investigation. Just token inspections and polite nudges to ‘do better’.

Universities Agreement

Even Universities AgreementA document as risk-averse as a committee of consultants could write, it acknowledged that wage theft was a serious problem. Yet he treated this as an unfortunate glitch, rather than seeing it as the logical endpoint of a system created to extract more from staff while giving them less. Wage theft is not a fault of the system,

It is the inevitable result of a system completely devoid of transparency and accountability.

Wage theft is a moral and political betrayal of public universities, institutions once dedicated to knowledge, justice, and the common good. They have now been restructured to serve balance sheets and management power.

Collegiate governance has been replaced by opaque executive control. Teaching and research are now subordinated to production. Personnel are line items. Students are customers at best, ‘cash cows’ at worst.

Universities claim to stand for the truth. However, they spent years underpaying staff, hiding behind ‘stealth business’ to avoid public accountability. They claim to defend justice, but they turn into serial exploiters. They say they serve the community, hand over management to Big Four consultancies and park the funds in investment vehicles.

Where to from here?

Vanity scrutiny and PR-driven regrets aren’t going to cut it. Reform needs to go deeper. This means dismantling the corporate governance model that enables these abuses. It means putting an end to parasitic consultant addiction. First of all, this means restoring power to the people who make universities work – academics, students and professional staff.

Universities were laboratories of democracy in the past. They might again, but not so long as they remain captive of a ruling class whose first priority is protecting pay packets rather than the institutions they are supposed to serve.

Wage theft isn’t just about money. This is about the integrity, purpose and spirit of the public university. Until we confront the system that makes this theft inevitable, the damage will continue not only to workers but also to the higher education system.

Fair Work Commission opposes BHP but ignores wage theft