MEDIA RELEASE: University of Sydney underpayments scandal continues with consultants largess

9 October 2024

New information unearthed by the Greens has once again shone a spotlight on the underpayments scandal plaguing NSW’s universities.

The University of Sydney has admitted, in answers given to the Chair of the Education Committee, Greens MLC Abigail Boyd, that the university has spent millions of dollars more in calculating and administering the universities liability for chronic academic wage underpayments than it has actually paid out in remediation payments. The total expenditure on external contractors and consultants, including PwC, dwarfs the amount paid out to casual academic staff, and comes close to almost equalling the total value of remediation payments across all other professional staff work streams.

In answers to supplementary questions, University of Sydney Vice Chancellor Mark Scott told the committee that the University has made 842 payments to 514 casual academic staff for a total value of $2.8M (including interest and superannuation) as at 16 September 2024.

Across all remediation work streams within the Employee Payments Review program, the University has made 12,137 payments to 10,602 professional staff for a total value of $17.4M (including interest and superannuation) as at 16 September 2024.

The Employee Payment Review Program costs (excluding remediation payments) to complete historical reviews and calculate remediation payments from 2020 to August 2024 is $21.6M. External contractors, advisors and consultants have been engaged to support the Employee Payments Review Program at a cost of $12.3M.

The University of Sydney, in its latest annual report, reported expected liabilities for wage underpayments of $7.4M to professional and academic employees, and a further $70.1M to casual academic staff. $69.5M of this $70.1M provision remained unpaid at the end of 2023.

The National Tertiary Education Union, in June 2024, released an update to their Public Universities Wage Theft Report, in which they detailed over $382M so far in identified wage theft across the Australian higher education sector. In 2022 alone, the Top 10 Universities in Australia declared a combined spend to consultants of $249M.


Quotes attributable to Abigail Boyd, Greens NSW MLC and spokesperson for Public Accountability:


“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.

“They can’t continue pleading ignorance, the cat has been out of the bag for years, but the University management seems determined to run down the clock at the expense of a heavily casualised and underpaid workforce simply waiting to receive what is rightfully owed them.

“These latest revelations are a damning indictment and speak to a broken governance culture at one of our state’s most prestigious universities. This is far from an isolated incident - we can be all but certain that if it’s happening at Usyd, these governance failures are happening at universities right across the country.

“They’ve gotten away with so much, for so long, with next to no accountability. It’s past time we had a look under the hood of these public institutions, with a proper inquiry into their governance.


Quotes attributable to Adjunct professor Tamara Smith, Member for Ballina and USYD Alumni:


“These statistics are appalling. We know that across Australia Universities are spending about 60 cents in every dollar of their budget on senior executive salaries.

“Now we’ve learnt that the University of Sydney are spending 4 times the budget on consultants rather than on repaying casual academics which is very dire for educational outcomes.

“The casualisation of academics at the University of Sydney has reached absolute breaking point and the theft of wages of hard working academics is a death knell for quality education at a brown stone university and the university executives should be absolutely ashamed of themselves.”

“The standard of education at any university is directly linked to the standard of academic teaching and research. How can a brown stone university justify the mass casualisation of their academic staff and waste tens of millions of dollars on outsourcing to spin doctors?”

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