Casual staff at Australian universities are complaining that their employers short-change them millions of dollars a year via regular underpayment practices. A parliamentary inquiry into the unlawful underpayment of workers was alerted on Feb. 22 that over nine in ten casual workers at the University of Sydney did not receive compensation for carrying out a certain amount of work during the second semester in 2020. Siobhan Irving from Casualised, Unemployed & Precarious Uni Workers (CUPUW), a network of university staff with unstable jobs, said university managers constantly turned a deaf ear, refuted and warded off blame when casual employees expressed concerns over being underpaid. “The current system simply does not work. It relies on casuals fighting tooth and nail for years on end, with little incentive for university managers to change their practices,” she said. Staff are calling on universities to discard the practice of piece rates in which casuals …