University maintains it intends to repay staff as quickly as possible
The University of Sydney has drawn criticism from the chair of New South Wales' Senate Committee of Education for spending more on consultants than repaying underpaid casual academic staff.
As of September 16, the university has made 842 payments to 514 casual academic staff for a total value of $2.8 million, including interest and superannuation, according to University of Sydney Vice Chancellor Mark Scott.
Scott also told the committee last month that it made 12,137 payments to 10,602 professional staff for a total value of $17.4 million, including interest and superannuation.
However, costs for the university's Employee Payment Review Programme, excluding remediation payments, have reached $21.6 million. These cover the expenditure to complete historical reviews and calculate remediation payments from 2020 to August 2024.
According to Scott, the university also spent $12.3 million on external consultants, contractors, and advisors to support the Employee Payments Review Programme reviews and remediation processing.
Green MLC Abigail Boyd, chair of the NSW education committee, called the statistics a "damning indictment."
"What's clear from these new figures is that the money flows freely from the University of Sydney to their big business mates, but when it comes to actually repaying stolen wages to workers they will twist the tap closed so only the smallest trickle runs out," Boyd said in a statement this week.
Strong commitment to repayment
A spokesperson for the University of Sydney told The Guardian that they intended to repay affected individuals as quickly as possible.
However, they noted that most of the work done so far has been reviewing the incidences of underpayment in the university.
"The bulk of the work to date has been investigating and calculating incidences of underpayment across this period, ahead of remediation and payment of backpay," the spokesperson told The Guardian.
They added that they are continuing to identify and remediate any past underpayments, stressing that repaying underpaid individuals was a "complex and important work" that must be accurate.
"Multiple sources of historic information need to be analysed over a period of 13 semesters to correctly classify the work completed, identify any incorrect payments and calculate the individual remediation amounts."
Various universities across Australia have been embroiled with underpayment cases, with the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) expecting wage theft to exceed $382 million.
"Vice-chancellors and senior executives must be held to account for the industrial-scale wage theft that has become the shameful hallmark of Australian universities," said Alison Barnes, NTEU national president, in a previous statement.
