The University of Sydney has spent millions of dollars more on external contractors and consultants – including PwC – for calculating and administering liability for wage underpayments and a review of its systems than it has paid out to staff, answers provided to the Greens have revealed.
In the answers to supplementary questions, provided to chair of the New South Wales education committee, Greens MLC Abigail Boyd, it was revealed the university had repaid 514 casual staff a total value of $2.8m as of last month, while across all “remediation work streams”, it had paid 10,692 professional staff a total value of $17.4m.
At the same time, the costs of its employee payment review program from 2020 to 2024 was $21.6m. External contractors, advisers and consultants had been engaged at a cost of $12.3m.
In its latest annual report, the university anticipated liabilities for wage underpayments of $7.4m to ongoing employees, and a further $70.1m to casual academic staff – the vast majority of who remained unpaid.
Boyd said the latest revelations were a “damning indictment” speaking to a “broken governance culture” at prestigious universities.
“They’ve gotten away with so much, for so long, with next to no accountability,” she said. “It’s past time we had a look under the hood of these public institutions, with a proper inquiry into their governance.”
A spokesperson for the University of Sydney said paying people for their work was “imperative” and as was standard, it had brought in consultants to provide independent advice alongside a review.
“We are continuing to identify and remediate any past underpayments,” they said. “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 said they intended to pay people as quickly as possible, however this was “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,” they said.
The Greens member for Ballina and former student at the University of Sydney, Tamara Smith, said statistics on wage theft were “appalling” when contrasted to the high salaries of senior staff.
“We know that across Australia universities are spending about 60 cents in every dollar of their budget on senior executive salaries,” she said.
“Now we’ve learned that the University of Sydney are spending four times the budget on consultants rather than on repaying casual academics.
“How can a brownstone university justify the mass casualisation of their academic staff and waste tens of millions of dollars on outsourcing to spin doctors?”
According to estimates made by the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU), the national wage theft total across the nation is on track to surpass $400m when totalling university self-admissions and underpayments cited in annual reports.
The NTEU has backed calls for a parliamentary inquiry into wage theft, labelling it a “national disgrace”.
Casual academics in the University of Sydney’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences have been attempting over several years to launch a formal multimillion-dollar wage theft claim, which was taken on by the NTEU in 2022.
Last month, the NTEU’s University of Sydney branch was informed the union was unable to escalate the claim as the university’s new enterprise agreement had come into effect, superseding 2018’s – while reaching a deal for $60,000 in repayments.
