Uni staff gear up for pay strike, as underpayments climb to $11m

University of Queensland staff are preparing to stop work for half a day next week in their fight over pay and entitlements, as their employer signed an agreement to pay back thousands of employees it had shortchanged.

The university signed an agreement with the Fair Work Ombudsman on Tuesday, a week before staff planned to stop work following stalled enterprise bargaining wage negotiations.

The latest figures show the number of UQ employees underpaid through systemic faults has grown by more than 6000 people.

About 16,400 staff were shorted an average of $564 each, with the underpayments ranging from more than $41,600 – including interest and superannuation – to less than $1.

Most of those who missed wages were casual employees, which National Tertiary Education Union UQ branch president Professor Andrew Bonnell said made up just under half the university’s workforce.

“It’s been a systemic problem that the higher education sectors relied too much on cheap, casual labour,” he said.

“There’s still an awful lot of teaching being done by casuals and … we’ve also had people with PhDs who’ve been teaching the same course for many years, and they’re the group who really should have been converted [to a permanent position] by now.”

Bonnell said the union was pushing to increase casual employees’ entitlements, which included raising superannuation rates to be equal to other staff members.

The union was also arguing for a larger pay increase than the 2.8 per cent offered by the university.

“The university’s got about a half-billion-dollar surplus in the last two years … so we think UQ can do better than 2.8 per cent a year, which is below inflation,” Bonnell said.

The underpayments came from system errors that ignored conditions laid out in enterprise agreements from 2014, 2018, and 2021.

UQ Vice-Chancellor Deborah Terry said the errors related to base pay rates for casual academic staff with PhDs, missing overtime, and missing minimum engagement times, which lay out the minimum number of hours an employee can be paid after showing up for a shift.

“I would like to sincerely apologise again to current and former staff,” Terry said.

“The university is implementing a range of measures – including improved systems and processes, compulsory training, enhanced assurance checks, and an independent audit – to ensure this does not happen in future.”