Monash faces underpayment lawsuit after rewrite bid fails again

Australia’s academic union says it will resume a A$9 million (£4.7 million) underpayment lawsuit after the industrial umpire dismissed Monash University’s appeal against a decision barring it from retrospectively changing its enterprise agreement.

The judgment ends a year-long pause in National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) proceedings to force Monash to remunerate about 4,500 current and former casual staff for unpaid student consultations.

Last year, the university attempted to head off the union’s action by amending the 2019 enterprise agreement. A newly inserted sentence would have defined scheduled staff-student interactions occurring up to a week before or after related lectures and tutorials as “contemporaneous consultations” requiring no payment.

In June, Fair Work Commission (FWC) deputy president Andrew Bell rejected the university’s application to rewrite the agreement, saying staff’s legal rights would have been “adversely affected”.

That decision has now been upheld by the full bench of the FWC, which did not find “any appealable error” in the June judgment.

NTEU president Alison Barnes said it was the “end of the road for Monash’s extraordinary attempt to dodge a wage theft claim”.

She said allowing an employer to retrospectively change an enterprise agreement “would have been a dangerous precedent for all Australian workers”.

The NTEU’s Victorian secretary, Sarah Roberts, criticised Monash’s “stalling tactics”. She said the university should “admit wrongdoing and give thousands of staff the millions of dollars they are owed”.

However, Monash said it intended to review the full bench appeal decision.

“Monash is committed to paying its staff accurately in line with the enterprise agreement and legislation,” a spokesman said. “We want to provide sessional staff and supervisors with clarity on the casual payment rates for student consultation.”

Monash’s union branch president, Ben Eltham, said the university was pursuing a “high-risk legal manoeuvre” to “dodge responsibility” for underpayments after agreeing to resolve a separate A$8.6 million claim in 2021.

Dr Eltham said staff were “deeply dissatisfied” with Monash’s governance. “The university has shown it can’t be trusted to investigate itself,” he said. “We need an independent inquiry into systemic staff underpayments at this A$3 billion public institution.”

The branch plans a strike on 9 and 10 October over job security, pay and “wage theft” issues.

The Monash judgment was handed down nine days after UNSW Sydney became the latest Australian university to incur legal proceedings for underpaying casual staff. The Fair Work Ombudsman has launched the action over breaches dating back to 2017. UNSW has already repaid about A$11 million of previously identified underpayments.

Meanwhile, a 5 October meeting of Australian education ministers was briefed on an “inter-jurisdictional” working group’s efforts to make universities “exemplary employers”, among other governance and safety improvements.

The working group was formed after an interim report from the Universities Accord panel stressed the need for governance reform. The ministers have scheduled an extra meeting in November to consider the group’s advice.

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com