AHEIA corrects the record on university underpayments
The Australian Higher Education Industrial Association (AHEIA) says universities are united in finding, repaying and preventing staff underpayments, and rejects recent media claims that Australian universities are engaged in “wage theft”.
AHEIA says this reporting does not reflect the findings of the Senate inquiry into wage theft, or the public record of the Fair Work Ombudsman (FWO).
“Underpayments are serious, and universities treat them that way. But words matter. Wage theft is a criminal offence, and under Australian law it requires intentional conduct,” AHEIA Executive Director Craig Laughton said.
“There is a material difference between deliberate and dishonest underpayment, payroll error, administrative failure, a contested interpretation, and complexity within an industrial instrument. Applying the same label to all of these circumstances is inaccurate, and it does nothing to help the staff concerned get paid correctly.”
What the Senate Committee found
The Senate Education and Employment References Committee report on wage theft, tabled in June 2026, said the word ‘theft’ “connotes deliberate, dishonest wrongdoing; yet, as the evidence to this inquiry made clear, the label is routinely applied to conduct involving no such intent”.
It found that applying “a single, pejorative term across conduct of such different character is inaccurate and unhelpful”.
The Committee also found that the criminal offence “is directed at a narrow category of deliberate conduct, while the structural driver of most underpayment, being the complexity of the modern award and enterprise agreement system, remains unaddressed”.
“AHEIA supports the criminal offence for wage theft,” Mr Laughton said. “Anyone who deliberately underpays workers should face the full force of the law. That is precisely why the term should be reserved only for that conduct.”
Correcting the record
- The $380 million cited in recent reporting is not a sum “owed”. The figure appears to come from a June 2024 National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) media release. It described only around $203 million as confirmed. The rest was $168 million in provisions universities had set aside for suspected underpayments and a further $10 million estimated by the NTEU. Provisions and estimates are not established debts. Underpayments identified by universities have been repaid or are being repaid, in most cases under FWO oversight.
- Underpayment does not need to be deliberate to be unlawful. It has long been a contravention of the Fair Work Act attracting civil penalties. What commenced on 1 January 2025 was a criminal offence for intentional underpayment.
What the enforceable undertakings show
AHEIA has analysed all 16 enforceable undertakings entered into between the FWO and universities. Together they record identified underpayments of $190.7 million in wages and superannuation, and $228.5 million once interest is added. These are the amounts the regulator itself has documented.
$190.7m in wages and superannuation identified across the 16 enforceable undertakings | Over 90% of the money identified was paid before signing an enforceable undertaking | All but two began with the university reporting the underpayment to the regulator |
In all but two of these matters, the university went to the FWO first. In most undertakings the FWO has expressly acknowledged the university’s cooperation, its early and open disclosure, or both.
Across the undertakings approximately 90 per cent of the money identified had already been paid by the time the undertaking was signed.
Almost every undertaking requires mandatory training for the managers, timesheet approvers, human resources staff and payroll staff who apply the agreements, delivered to a standard the FWO must accept and evidenced back to the regulator.
“In most cases, universities found the problems, disclosed them, quantified them and paid their staff with interest. That is what taking underpayments seriously looks like,” Mr Laughton said. “Labels that treat every underpayment as theft are counterproductive, working against the cooperative approach that universities, staff and their representatives have developed to resolve these matters.”
Fixing the cause
AHEIA is calling for government support for a tripartite process to identify and simplify the enterprise agreement provisions that cause interpretive difficulty and payroll risk, without reducing employee entitlements.
This would extend to enterprise agreements the Committee’s recommendation that modern awards be made clearer and easier to apply.
“The focus has to be on fixing the complexity of enterprise agreements and the systems that apply them, working with staff and unions,” Mr Laughton said. “Relabelling genuine underpayments as wage theft fixes nothing. We call on commentators and media to reserve the term for deliberate and dishonest conduct.”
