The Fair Work Ombudsman punished two universities this week for underpaying staff. That makes a total of 16 universities that have been required to meet specific conditions on improving their payroll performance.
Uni Queensland was subjected to the FWO’s 15th enforceable undertaking imposed on a university. It is the end of a blizzard of bureaucracy at the university, which commissioned five reviews to work how much it owed how many staff. It turned out to be 16,000 people due $11m in unpaid wages plus super. With almost all the payments made, the FWO slugged the university with a $170,000 “contrition payment” to Commonwealth Consolidated Revenue and imposed oversight requirements.
The FWO explains what Uni Q got wrong, “there were errors relating to minimum engagement periods (where a worker must be paid for a minimum number of hours, regardless of actual hours worked), casual pay codes, base rates for some casual employees, failure to identify relevant PhD qualifications, and not recording additional or overtime hours worked.”
It was much the same at Murdoch U, which failed to pay the rates specified under the 2014, 2018 and 2023 Enterprise Agreements, plus the 2010 and 2020 Fitness Industry Awards.
The FWO also succinctly sets out what Murdoch stuffed up in its $4.9m underpayment: “most of the underpayments resulted from the university applying incorrect classifications and missed step-increments leading to underpayment of overtime rates, shift loadings and minimum engagement entitlements to professional staff; and underpaying PhD, tutoring, and other academic activities rates to casual academic staff.”
The FWO requires Murdoch U to pay the Commonwealth $125,000 in contrition and, as with Uni Queensland, imposes various performance requirements to ensure it pays people the agreed rate for their jobs in future. And the Ombudsman also wants Murdoch management to make sure it has fixed everything, requiring it to commission one, or maybe two independent audits “of its compliance with workplace laws and enterprise agreements.”
The failings at both universities are bad enough to attract financial penalties, but the nature of the errors are standard stuff across universities, going on for years. The first iteration of the sector issues was not paying people their correct super, but that was replaced a decade ago with straight out pay packet fails. One way or another, the FWO has interacted with many universities across the country, generally after managements had realised they had stuffed up and reporting themselves in. Which means pretty much from now on any new cases could be from repeat offenders who have not sorted their systems out.
Stand out cases have been FWO Federal Court wins against the University of Melbourne and Uni NSW – but a third of the other public universities have now been humiliated in public for not paying their staff what they are owed.