‘Exploitative practice’: emails reveal casual academics offered gift cards instead of wages

Academics at Australian universities are being offered gift cards as payment, new documents reveal, as a union decries the “casualisation disease” that affects the higher education sector.

Internal University of Technology Sydney emails — released through a freedom of information request that Crikey submitted after receiving a tip-off — reveal one faculty debated the use of gift cards as payment for academics as recently as last year.

The UTS emails paint a picture of university staff struggling to do the right thing while navigating complex rules, and show that human resources is clear that gift cards should not be paid.

“Bloody hell… I may be premature, but I think [the faculty of] health want to have another run at the gift card idea,” one exasperated human resources official wrote in a Microsoft Teams message to a colleague in October last year.

That’s several months after a Senate inquiry heard that “shockingly” there was evidence casual academics were sometimes being paid in gift cards, emblematic of what one committee witness described as “a culture of theft” on the part of universities.

The Senate Standing Committee on Economics said in its report, published March 2022, that at least 21 of Australia’s 40 universities had been found to have been underpaying staff, “primarily casual academic staff”.

The report flagged that “shockingly, the committee heard that some casual academic staff have been paid in gift certificates, instead of the wages, loadings, leave and superannuation to which they are legally entitled”.

Dr Hayley Singer from the University of Melbourne Casuals’ Network expanded on the use of gift cards to the committee:

I contested this at the time because I know I can’t pay rent, pay for transport or pay for medical bills with gift cards. Senior academics pushed back against this, too, and still it went ahead. This is how casual and insecurely employed academics are treated when we bring our professionalism and our expertise onto campus and into the classroom … [university management] could not believe that there would be a problem with paying professionals, highly specialised people, with a gift card.

One young academic who spoke to Crikey said she had personally been offered gift cards for casual work and was aware of a number of instances where other colleagues had been offered their wages in gift cards.

The woman, who has a relevant master’s degree from an internationally renowned university, provided evidence of being offered a gift card as a “thank-you” for a lecture at one of NSW’s premier universities. She did not wish to be identified because she feared it would impact her employment prospects.

“Between casualisation and pay which doesn’t reflect expertise or teaching loads, I struggle to see a future for myself in the NSW university system,” she said.

“The conditions casual and junior academics work in, and the universities’ impersonal and opaque structures, have left me burnt-out and disillusioned.”

The UTS emails released to Crikey reveal the issue of paying workers with gift cards had been brought up in a faculty diversity and inclusion committee prior to July 2022, when a lecturer wrote to a colleague to say he had “been informed that the faculty of health has been instructed not to pay continuing guest lecturers with gift cards”.

The email came in response to a colleague’s suggestion he “thank” a casual academic for giving a guest lecture by “[providing] them with a gift card (eg Visa card) to the value of approximately $200, which is considered the equivalent of the contracted rate”.

That same month, an HR official at the school drafted an email for the dean of the health faculty to send out to staff, urging them to “stop the practice of using gift cards as payment for guest lecturers”.

“This manner of payment is not allowed under the UTS enterprise agreement,” the draft email said.

A UTS spokesperson declined to answer a question from Crikey asking whether the email was ever sent out to staff.

Academic staff at the university complained in other emails that the system for paying casual staff was “complex” and difficult to navigate for people who aren’t experts in human resourcing.

For example, one staff academic said, the health faculty was only allowed to issue casual academic contracts to professionals registered with the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency.

“A casual professional contract would be workable but I am not a HR expert and need advice about this,” the person wrote.

A senior faculty manager at the university described the gift card issue as “a hot topic at the moment” in another July 2022 email.

“I was informed a short while ago that we were not able to provide gift cards and that guests who are presenting, even if only once, must be provided with a casual academic contract,” the manager wrote.

“This has a lot of implications including paperwork for everyone, the requirement to complete compulsory [health and safety] training, etc.

“However there is a concern that this practice is not in line with the university enterprise agreement.”

Despite the discussions in July, the option of paying casuals with gift cards appeared to still be on the table in October last year.

That’s when the same faculty manager mentioned above emailed colleagues to say, “I have three different academics all wanting to use gift cards”.

A second person chimed in to say, “[W]e have tried to stamp out this practice but I think it now needs a directive with some authority to communicate when gift cards can be issued and when it isn’t appropriate.”

“Seriously?” replied a third colleague, working in human resources. “Why can’t the dean send something out. She has the authority.”

A UTS spokesperson told Crikey the university “does not permit the use of gift cards as payment to employees for their work, academic or otherwise”.

“Gift cards are used at UTS, as they are at many other organisations, as a token of appreciation for non-employees who volunteer their time at the university, for example as research participants, or as members of event panels or as one-off guest speakers,” the spokesperson said.

“From time to time parts of the university have sought the advice of the human resources area, about whether a particular type of engagement constitutes employment, and would therefore require payment of wages.

“The consistent advice and guidance has been that if we engage someone as an employee to undertake work, they must be paid the appropriate wage, and that gift cards are not an acceptable way to remunerate people for their service. Gift cards can be used as a token of appreciation if work is not being performed.”

National Tertiary Education Union national president Alison Barnes told Crikey the union had become aware of the gift card problem through the Senate committee.

She declined to comment on the UTS emails, but said that in general, “wage theft and dodgy payment practices underscore exactly why we need to urgently address the insecure work crisis”.

“This is yet another symptom of the casualisation disease that has infected universities,” she added. “The cure is simple. We need more secure jobs in higher education. The fact that one-third of university staff are insecurely employed is a damning statistic.

“Unfortunately, casual and fixed-term employment makes people more vulnerable to exploitative practices like payment in gift cards.”