Nine Entertainment continues to reimburse staff over ‘complex’ back pay error

Media company Nine Entertainment has conceded the payment errors it made over a six-year period were difficult to unravel as it continues to deal with the fallout.

Nine Entertainment’s managing director of publishing, James Chessell. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Dylan Coker

Nine Entertainment’s disastrous payroll error – which resulted in the company owing back pay to potentially hundreds of past and present staff – remains unresolved, with the media giant writing to eligible employees to update them on the “extremely complex” saga.

The company, which has spent months going through a multistage process in dealing with the wage payment errors, said it was still working out which employees were eligible for payments.

“The process to collate data from more than a hundred sources and calculate historical entitlements was extremely complex,” Nine's email sent last week to eligible employees said.

Staff who received incorrect salary amounts were working on the company’s major publications, including The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Australian Financial Review, the Brisbane Times and WAToday, from 2016 to 2022.

Last year Nine’s managing director of publishing, James Chessell, told staff there would be a “review of all work performed across the Nine mastheads going back six years to identify if there were occasions where employees may have been entitled to overtime rates”.

The process began in May last year and started after it was revealed employment agreements stated that an employee was entitled to two days off each week, however under previous arrangements staff had flexibility to when they could take those days off.

“It was, however, brought to Nine’s attention that despite the flexibility this practice offered staff, the terms of the agreements strictly require staff to have a minimum of two rostered days off in each week (Monday to Sunday),” one email to a former employer said.

“Where this does not occur, overtime applies.”