La Trobe University will complete more than $10.77 million in payments, including superannuation and interest, to more than 6,700 underpaid staff as part of entering into an Enforceable Undertaking (EU) with the Fair Work Ombudsman.
Under the EU, the University must also make a $220,000 contrition payment to the Commonwealth's Consolidated Revenue Fund and implement a broad range of measures to ensure compliance with workplace laws going forward.
The underpaid employees performed work across La Trobe University's 10 schools, including at each of its Victorian campuses and its Sydney campus. They were engaged as casual academics and professional staff.
The underpayments were caused by systemic failures in compliance, central oversight and governance processes, with schools adopting differing payroll practices.
The University incorrectly applied its Enterprise Agreements, resulting in many casual employees not being paid for all hours worked and being underpaid minimum engagement period entitlements.
Most of the underpayments related to marking work. The University often paid casual academics according to 'benchmarks' such as words-per-hour, words-per-student or assessments-per-term, rather than the actual hours they had worked.
The University also underpaid casual staff for lecturing, tutoring, and subject-coordination work and failed to keep accurate records of hours worked and pay rates.
In total, La Trobe University underpaid 6,774 current and former employees more than $9.3 million for work performed between January 2015 and December 2022.
It is back-paying the employees in full, plus an additional $909,422 in superannuation and $556,061 in interest. A total of more than $10.08 million in entitlements inclusive of superannuation and interest has already been back-paid.
Individual underpayments range from $2 to $91,837, including superannuation and interest. Thirty-five employees were underpaid more than $20,000, excluding superannuation and interest.
Fair Work Ombudsman Anna Booth said an Enforceable Undertaking was appropriate as the University had cooperated with the FWO's investigation and demonstrated a strong commitment to rectifying its non-compliance issues.
"La Trobe University deserves credit for acknowledging its non-compliance issues and committing significant time and resources to put in place corrective measures that will ensure both full remediation of impacted staff and improved compliance for the future," Ms Booth said.
"The matter serves as a warning of the significant problems that can result from an employer failing to have appropriate checks and balances to ensure workplace relations compliance."
Ms Booth said the commitments secured under the Enforceable Undertaking, including better centralised oversight and a consultative body for improved collaboration between university management, employees and their union, would help to drive cultural change across La Trobe University, and were an example for the wider university sector.
"Improving universities' workplace compliance is a priority for the Fair Work Ombudsman. We look forward to working with the leadership teams at universities nationally to assist them to do the sustained, smart work required to ensure full compliance with workplace laws," Ms Booth said.
Under the EU, La Trobe University has committed to rectifying all outstanding underpayments in full, plus interest, and implementing a range of measures to ensure future compliance, including:
- updating payroll and record-keeping infrastructure;
- establishing better centralised oversight of workplace relations processes;
- establishing and convening a consultative body consisting of university management, employees and the union;
- implementing workplace relations training for key management staff and commissioning, at its own cost, an independent audit to check it is meeting all employee entitlements;
- maintaining an employee payments complaint and review mechanism;
- providing regular updates to the Fair Work Ombudsman about the progress of any reviews and on any employee complaints or non-compliance issues discovered;
- developing written guidelines relating to casual entitlements under its 2023 Enterprise Agreement and on-going compliance monitoring activities;
- informing staff of the EU through an intranet notice, all-staff email and written notice to affected employees; and
- committing the La Trobe University Council to explicitly focus on workplace relations compliance.
Since announcing in 2022 that addressing systemic non-compliance in the university sector was a top priority, the Fair Work Ombudsman has also entered into five other Enforceable Undertakings, with the University of Sydney, University of Melbourne, the University of Technology Sydney, the University of Newcastle and Charles Sturt University; secured court penalties against the University of Melbourne; and commenced ongoing legal action against the University of NSW.
