The University of Sydney has entered into an enforceable undertaking with the Fair Work Ombudsman, after self-disclosing risk of non-compliance to the regulator in 2020.
The agreement outlines the significant work the University has already undertaken to address matters of non-compliance, and its continuing commitment to identify any historical underpayments, remediate affected staff and improve systems, processes and controls to ensure staff are paid correctly now and in the future.
The University has also agreed to make a contrition payment and undertake several activities to ensure ongoing compliance with workplace laws, including finalising a detailed historical review of past payments for casual academic staff and commissioning an independent audit of employee entitlements.
Provost and Deputy Vice-Chancellor Professor Annamarie Jagose said the University's underpayment of some staff was deeply regrettable.
"We apologise again to our affected staff. 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.
"We're advancing a large program of work across the University to make sure our staff, including our casual academic colleagues, are being paid correctly and we are meeting our record-keeping obligations.
"We're also continuing to identify and remediate any past underpayments and will remediate all identified underpayments in full, including superannuation and interest, as quickly as possible."
Our employee payments review
As of 1 November 2024, the University has paid approximately $20.5 million in remediation payments to more than 11,700 current and former staff.
This includes remediation for current and former professional staff following a review of more than 2.5 million payslips.
We are continuing our detailed review of casual academic work to determine underpayments that may be owed arising from practices relating to work allocation and payments during the period from semester 1 2017 to semester 1 2023. In line with financial reporting obligations for universities, our Annual Report includes a provision of $70.1m as potential underpayment liabilities that is based on a series of extrapolated assumptions while investigations are completed.
To determine the actual remediation amounts, the University has been conducting a detailed analysis of work undertaken by casual academic staff in priority Schools across the University over a period of 13 semesters, with around 250,000 individual activities undertaken across the University each year. This process must be done manually as there are multiple sources of information and records to be identified, located and analysed.
