Thousands of staff who worked at the University of Melbourne between 2014 and 2024, will share a payment of $72 million as part of the Enforceable Obligation (EU).
The university has admitted failing to pay 25,576 current and former employees a total of $54.05 million, including retirement pensions and interest, the Fair Work Ombudsman said on Monday.
“Academics were often paid according to ‘benchmarks’, such as words per hour or time per student, rather than the actual hours they worked,” the ombudsman said, adding that “many hours of assessments” and other academic work usually went unpaid.
Individual underpayments ranged from less than $1 to $150,881, with one in six employees paid more than $100,000 and most under $5,000.
Most of the underpayment relates to casual academic and professional staff across all the university’s faculties and campuses, but it also underpays some term and continuing academic and professional staff, as well as some trade and service staff.
It is the “most comprehensive” EU any university has entered, Fair Work Ombudsman Anna Booth said.
She said this would help drive cultural change in the wider university sector.
“The University of Melbourne has admitted that it has underpaid a range of rights owed under its enterprise agreements, including minimum wages, minimum engagement rights, casual sessional teaching and casual non-sessional activities, shift loads and overtime entitlements,” Fair Work said.
These underpayments were discovered during a remediation program that was launched by the university in 2020.
The University has already paid most of these entitlements, plus interest, superannuation and interest on superannuation.
He also agreed to pay a remorse payment of $600,000 to the Commonwealth Consolidated Revenue Fund and to put in place measures to prevent future non-compliance with workplace laws.
The ombudsman found that “systemic gaps in compliance, oversight and management processes are key causes of underpayments”.
The university has now committed to a number of measures to address these gaps and omissions.
“This includes the university investing last year in 13 new roles, called workforce compliance managers, which strengthen the governance and compliance of the corporate agreement, providing centralized oversight and support for each faculty,” the ombudsman said.
“The University of Melbourne deserves recognition for recognizing its management failures and non-compliance issues and devoting significant time and resources to putting in place corrective measures,” Booth said.
