FWO undertakings show $190.7 million identified
Australian university underpayments should not all be described as wage theft, according to the Australian Higher Education Industrial Association, which points to a June 2026 Senate committee report and 16 enforceable undertakings entered into between the Fair Work Ombudsman and universities.
The Australian Higher Education Industrial Association says universities are united in finding, repaying and preventing staff underpayments, and rejects recent media claims that Australian universities are engaged in “wage theft”.
“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.
The Senate Education and Employment References Committee report on wage theft was tabled in June 2026. It found that applying “a single, pejorative term across conduct of such different character is inaccurate and unhelpful”.
The committee also found the criminal offence is directed at a narrow category of deliberate conduct, while the structural driver of most underpayment remains the complexity of the modern award and enterprise agreement system. Underpayment does not need to be deliberate to be unlawful, and it has long been a contravention of the Fair Work Act attracting civil penalties.
A criminal offence for intentional underpayment commenced on 1 January 2025. Laughton said AHEIA supports that offence and argued the term should be reserved for deliberate underpayment.
FWO undertakings and repayments
AHEIA disputes the $380 million cited in recent reporting as a sum “owed”. It says the figure appears to come from a June 2024 National Tertiary Education Union announcement.
That NTEU release 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.
AHEIA argues provisions and estimates are not established debts. It also says underpayments identified by universities have been repaid or are being repaid, in most cases under FWO oversight.
Across the 16 enforceable undertakings entered into between the FWO and universities, identified underpayments totalled $190.7 million in wages and superannuation. The total rises to $228.5 million once interest is added.
AHEIA says these are the amounts the regulator itself documented. In all but two matters, the university went to the FWO first.
“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,” Laughton said.
Across the undertakings, approximately 90% of the money identified had already been paid by the time the undertaking was signed. In most undertakings, AHEIA says the FWO expressly acknowledged the university’s cooperation, its early and open disclosure, or both.
Almost every undertaking requires mandatory training for managers, timesheet approvers, human resources staff and payroll staff who apply the agreements. The training must meet a standard the FWO accepts and be evidenced back to the regulator.
AHEIA is calling for government support for a tripartite process to identify and simplify the enterprise agreement provisions it says cause interpretive difficulty and payroll risk, without reducing employee entitlements. It says this would extend to enterprise agreements the committee’s recommendation that modern awards be made clearer and easier to apply.
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