When the University of Melbourne confirmed in August 2020 that it had been underpaying casual academic staff for marking, preparation, student consultation and the ordinary email traffic that follows a tutorial, it was not the first institution to face the claim. It was the one that made the cost impossible to ignore. The university set aside $45 million for remediation after an audit found systemic shortcomings in how sessional academics were classified and paid. Within months, UNSW Sydney, Monash University, Deakin University and several other institutions had launched or expanded their own payroll reviews. What began as a union complaint had become a sector-wide compliance problem.

The announcement mattered because it named the mechanism, not just the outcome. Underpayment in Australian higher education rarely looked like a pay clerk entering the wrong number. It looked like a staffing model that paid a tutor for scheduled contact hours while treating the preparation, marking, student correspondence and administrative follow-up as though they did not exist. For a first-year sociology tutorial, that could mean two hours paid and four hours worked. Repeated across a semester, across a faculty, across a decade, the gap became a structural wage bill, and the people carrying it were the most precarious employees on campus.

Why contact-hour pay made underpayment the normal operating model

Casual academic employees in Australia are usually paid under enterprise agreements, not individual contracts. The agreements set hourly rates for sessional work, often expressed by activity: a lecture, a tutorial, a repeat tutorial, marking a script. The design assumes the hourly rate compensates associated duties. In practice, university audits and the National Tertiary Education Union have found that many universities paid staff only for the visible contact hour and left associated duties unpaid or underpaid. This became the central claim in NTEU wage theft cases: the agreement rate was legal, but the application of the rate was not.

The distinction matters because those audits are not simply about missing payments. They are about whether workloads were recorded honestly, whether individual academics were moved from one classification to another without backpay, and whether systems designed for permanent continuing staff could handle the irregular, often fragmented hours of casual teaching. The University of Melbourne review found exactly that. Deakin University's 2020 payroll review identified $2.3 million in underpayments, a figure that looks small next to Melbourne's but told the same story: casual rates paid for some tasks, not all.

The audit wave and the bill it produced

By early 2021, the NTEU put the national wage theft bill at well over $100 million. Individual institutions confirmed figure after figure. The University of Melbourne's $45 million remediation estimate was still under review. Monash University identified about $8.6 million in underpayments across a wide group of current and former casual staff. Deakin University found $2.3 million affecting more than a thousand people. Other universities reported smaller amounts, but the pattern was identical: underpayment concentrated in teaching-intensive casual work, in faculties that relied on sessional academics rather than continuing staff, and among employees who had left the institution years earlier.

Those employees were the hardest to repay. A PhD student who tutored in 2015 and left in 2018 was no longer on the payroll system, no longer using a university email address, and often no longer living at the address on file. Remediation programmes had to trace former staff through tax file declarations, old supervisor records, public notices and archived faculty lists. That administrative burden is why an audit announcement is not the same as a repayment. The gap between the two is where the union's patience runs out and where the Fair Work Ombudsman's enforceable undertakings have begun to set deadlines.

What Australian law now does about wage theft

The legal footing changed on 1 January 2025. Intentional underpayment became a criminal offence under the Fair Work Act 2009, with penalties that include up to 10 years' imprisonment for individuals and fines for corporations up to the greater of three times the underpayment or $7.825 million. The change came through the Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Closing Loopholes) Act 2023 and its 2024 follow-up. Universities that fail to self-report a known underpayment now face a different question from the one they faced in 2020. The Fair Work Ombudsman can issue compliance notices, accept enforceable undertakings, and refer matters for prosecution.

The practical effect is not limited to penalties. Criminalisation changes the advice lawyers give to governing councils and audit committees. A remediation programme that once appeared in a risk register as a human resources matter now appears as a legal and reputational liability. Several universities have responded by moving payroll reviews from an internal audit exercise to a board-level project, with external accountants and external legal review. The more substantial shift is in bargaining: the National Tertiary Education Union has made payment for all required work, not just contact hours, a central demand in enterprise agreement negotiations.

What this means for someone holding a casual teaching contract

For academics on casual or sessional contracts, the audit wave does not change the basic duty to keep records. It does change the remedies. A casual tutor who suspects underpayment should first check the applicable enterprise agreement to see what rate applies to each activity, then compare it with the payslip. Under the Fair Work Act, employees can ask for records, raise a dispute through the Fair Work Commission, or make a complaint to the Fair Work Ombudsman. Time limits generally run from when the underpayment occurred, but universities' own remediation programmes have sometimes covered periods beyond the standard six-year recovery window when the underpayment was systemic.

This matters for postgraduate researchers who fund their degrees through teaching. A research assistant or tutor who accepts a flat rate because that is how it has always been done may be signing away more than time. Postgraduate researchers can compare the workload and payment guidance in our guide for Australian research assistants when checking whether their combined teaching and research duties are being counted. The NTEU has published checklists and runs payment clinics on multiple campuses, and the Fair Work Ombudsman's online pay and conditions tool can compare duties against the award. The union's position is blunt: the system counted on casual academics not checking. The audits are the first widespread test of whether they were right.

The year-two question

Universities with the most advanced remediation have now passed the first stage: they found the backpay, calculated the interest, added the compulsory superannuation, and began outreach. The harder stage is structural. Unless workload allocation systems record preparation, marking, consultation and out-of-class student contact as separate activities, and unless enterprise agreement rates are implemented in timetabling software rather than in policy notes, the same underpayment will reappear. That is the question governing councils should be asking in the second year of their remediation programmes: not how much has been repaid, but whether the systems that produced the debt have actually changed.

The answer will vary by campus. Large research universities can fund external auditors, new payroll modules, a dedicated compliance team and the extra staff to run them. Teaching-intensive universities with smaller administrative capacity will struggle to do the same at the same pace. The underpayment debt did not fall evenly across the sector, and the capacity to prevent it from happening again will not be distributed evenly either. That difference, between the institution that repays quickly and the institution that cannot afford to stop underpaying, is where the next wave of claims will be found.

Photo by Michael Jerrard on Unsplash