University of Western Australia to backpay $10.6 million to staff

The University of Western Australia (UWA) will backpay thousands of former and current employees a total of $10.6 million after more than a decade of underpayment.

The back-payment includes $4 million in interest and will cover 5,500 former and 2,700 current employees of UWA who were underpaid starting July 2013.

The UWA attributed the underpayments to shortfalls in its application of the 17% superannuation contribution on some employee allowance and leave entitlements.

Amit Chakma, UWA Vice-Chancellor, stated that the discrepancies were unintentional, and the matter was already reported to the Fair Work Ombudsman.

"I deeply regret this has occurred, and offer my apologies to those affected," Chakma said in a statement. "It was due to differing interpretation of legislative changes and inconsistent understanding of Enterprise Agreement obligations."

According to the university, it will contact all affected employees to apologise and inform them that a back-payment programme for the underpayment will commence.

"We are committed to prompt remediation to ensure all employees have been fairly paid their full entitlements," Chakma said.

Its Employee Entitlement Remediation Programme will also assess and remediate identified discrepancies in long service leave and casual payments.

"We will ensure our processes and practices are changed to prevent such matters from reoccurring in the future," Chakma said.

Underpayments in universities

The UWA adds to the growing number of universities in Australia admitting to underpaying employees, including Swinburne University of Technology, James Cooke University, and the Australian Catholic University.

The National Tertiary Education Union said UWA staff have the "every right to be angry" about the underpayments.

"The fact that WA's richest university has presided over $10 million in wage theft shows an urgent need for state and federal governments to come down hard on the executives responsible," said NTEU UWA Branch President Sanna Peden in a statement.

"The NTEU will do everything in our power to ensure staff are repaid in full for this egregious behaviour."