In an interview the ABC describes as exclusive Provost Nicola Phillips apologises for underpayment of casual staff, announces the university “would overhaul its employment model” and “ ‘dramatically’ reduce its reliance on casual staff”

This repeats Vice Chancellor Duncan Maskell’s statement last September, that ““the university will continue efforts already underway to fully remediate affected individuals’ claims, and to put in place systems and processes to prevent these under-payments being repeated.”  “There had been a “systemic failure of respect from this institution for those valued, indeed vital employees,” he said (CMM September 10)

Universities, including Melbourne have long been under pressure to address widespread payment of casual academic staff below enterprise agreement specified rates.

Last year  Uni Melbourne conceded it had underpaid 1000 past and then present casual academic staff in the faculties of Arts, Fine Arts and Music, Engineering-IT, Medicine–Dentistry–Health Sciences and Science and paid “around” $9.5m owed (CMM September 10).

And this March the university was in dispute with the campus branch of the National Tertiary Education Union over whether PhD qualified casuals should be paid the doctoral rate for all teaching. “We intend to look in more detail at this issue with a view to developing consistent standards and qualification requirements for casual sessional teaching across all of our faculties,” Uni Melbourne management said then, (CMM March 22).

Underpayments of casuals at campuses across the country has attracted attention from Senate inquiries and in March Victorian Higher Education Minister Gayle Tierney directed all the state’s public universities to advise her on measures to ensure underpayment of casual staff has stopped (CMM March 21).

Professor Phillips’ reference to reducing dependence on casual staff also confirms management’s stated position last November that relying on them is “neither desirable nor sustainable,” (CMM November 15). However, in last year’s conversion round for casuals seeking continuing employment, required by the Fair Work Act, 72 of the several thousand casuals on Uni Melbourne’s books were deemed to qualify on the basis of hours worked (CMM September 24).

The hours test used by universities has subsequently been called into question in a test case at Flinders U (CMM May 16).