Sydney University ordered to repay 15,000 workers $23m in stolen wages

The elite University of Sydney has apologised for nine years of wage theft from almost 15,000 staff, as the Fair Work Ombudsman ordered it to repay $23m.

Fair Work Ombudsman Anna Booth has warned universities against wage theft. Picture: Paul Hermes

The elite University of Sydney has apologised for nine years of wage theft from almost 15,000 staff, as the Fair Work Ombudsman ordered it to repay $23m.

The stolen wage scandal affects 80 per cent of staff, who were underpaid as much as $83,271, with underpayments typically about $1300 per worker.

Australia’s oldest university must also pay a $500,000 “contrition payment’’ – equivalent to a fine – to the Commonwealth’s Consolidated Revenue Fund.

Fair Work Ombudsman Anna Booth said the university had self-reported its payroll errors and “acknowledged its governance payments and breaches’’.

In an enforceable undertaking, Sydney University admitted it had underpaid base rates of pay, overtime, meal allowances and shift penalties, marking and tutorial rates and breached minimum shift periods for casuals.

It acknowledged it had failed to make and keep records relating to pay rates, hours of work, penalty loadings and overtime hours.

Ms Booth said that “systemic failures in compliance, operational controls and governance” were to blame for the breaches.

The underpayments affect permanent and casual academics and professional staff, with $1.8m owed to workers in the School of Psychology and School of Mathematics and Statistics, who were not paid properly for marking exams and assignments.

In the Conservatorium of Music, 36 staff are owed $1.43m in unpaid overtime.

Sydney University is still investigating potential under­payments in its Faculty of Engineering, the School of Veterinary Science and the Faculty of Medicine and Health.

It has already paid back $20.5m to 14,727 employees – including $19m in underpayments, $3.2m in interest and nearly $1m in superannuation.

The university has set aside $70m for potential payouts, after reviewing more than 2.5 million pay slips. The worst-affected workers are casual professional employees, owed $10.4m.

University of Sydney Provost and deputy vice-chancellor Professor Annamarie Jagose said the wage theft between 2014 and 2022 was “deeply regrettable’’.

“We apologise again to our affected staff,’’ she said on Thursday. “It’s imperative we pay our people correctly for the valuable work they do. It is central to our values of trust and accountability, and we are committed to getting this right.’’

The FWO action is the second in a week, after the University of Melbourne was ordered to backpay $72m to 25,576 staff, and was fined $600,000 on Monday.

The FWO is still investigating under­payments across 20 universities.

The National Tertiary Education Union said the latest case lifts the sector’s wage theft tally to $238m in confirmed underpayments affecting 142,000 staff.

NTEU national president Dr Alison Barnes said “public universities are prolific wage thieves’’.

She said wage theft “has become baked into universities’ business models’’.

“We need an urgent federal parliamentary inquiry into the broken governance model which has created an environment where wage theft has flourished,’’ she said.

The federal government still has not announced the chair of its new national expert governance council for the university sector, which will crack down on wage theft and advise on ways to peg vice-chancellor salaries to public service pay.

The scrutiny of universities’ pay systems coincides with sector-wide job cuts, due to limits on international student enrolments. The University of Canberra has announced a “voluntary separation program’’, with 200 job losses across five faculties by the end of next year.