The dramatic expansion of casual academic work in recent years is both a symptom of the crisis currently engulfing Australia’s universities and a key barrier to resolving it. For decades, successive governments and university managers have agreed that casual employment would deliver much needed “flexibility,” benefiting both workers and universities. The result has been rampant wage theft.

In the last two years, casual academics and National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) activists have exposed Monash, La Trobe, the University of Melbourne, the University of Newcastle, the University of New South Wales, and the University of Sydney for systematically underpaying casual academics by tens of millions of dollars. This list is likely to expand in coming months and years.

Indeed, the situation is so bad that university managers have largely stopped trying to conceal it. Last month, a Senate Economics Committee hearing listened to submissions from university workers and representatives from management. Although some of the university representatives downplayed the problem, none of them attempted to deny it.