UNSW to repay $32.7 million to 33,069 staff under Fair Work undertaking

The University of New South Wales signed an enforceable undertaking with the Fair Work Ombudsman on 3 July 2026, committing to rectification payments of $32,710,122 to 33,069 current and former employees. The regulator's statement, republished in full that day, breaks the figure into more than $23 million in underpaid wages and entitlements, more than $4.9 million in interest on those amounts, and more than $4.1 million in superannuation and interest on superannuation. Individual back payments range from less than one dollar to more than $398,000.

The undertaking covers entitlements owed under UNSW enterprise agreements between 2014 and 2023, along with admitted breaches of record keeping and pay slip requirements. Most of the affected workers were casual academics who were not paid correct rates for lectures, tutorials, demonstrations, course co-ordination meetings, exam supervision and marking. Professional staff were also short paid, among them laboratory assistants, administrators, technical officers and library staff, on minimum rates, overtime, allowances and long service leave. Affected employees worked at Sydney, Canberra, Albury, Coffs Harbour, Griffith, Port Macquarie and Wagga Wagga.

The undertaking followed a court penalty. In Fair Work Ombudsman v University of New South Wales [2025] FedCFamC2G 2151, the Federal Circuit and Family Court ordered UNSW to pay $213,120 after the university admitted it had failed to make and keep records for 63 casual academic employees in its business school at the Kensington campus between 2017 and 2022, including hours worked, rates of pay and details of casual loading, and had omitted casual loading information from pay slips. The penalty was discounted by 20 per cent from a starting figure of $265,400 to reflect UNSW's admissions and corrective action. Judge Brana Obradovic described the university's failures as systemic, long standing and long lasting. Fair Work Ombudsman Anna Booth said record keeping is a crucial part of compliance with workplace laws and that the penalty was a warning to all employers.

The striking feature of that judgment is what it did not punish. The $213,120 was imposed for defective paperwork alone, not for the underpayments themselves. The court noted that the non compliant records made it difficult, if not near impossible, for the regulator to verify how much staff had lost. The sequence is long: the Fair Work Ombudsman was first notified in 2018 after a complaint by a casual academic, UNSW self reported in 2020, a formal investigation followed, litigation was commenced in 2023, judgment was delivered in 2025 and the regulator announced the penalty in January 2026.

Beyond the money owed to staff, the undertaking requires UNSW to make a contrition payment of $500,000 to Commonwealth Consolidated Revenue. It also commits the university to as many as two independent compliance audits, mandatory training on pay obligations, reporting to the regulator every two months, an employee advocacy platform for staff with pay concerns, and a joint consultative committee involving staff and unions.

UNSW has not contested the findings. In a statement issued on 3 July 2026, Vice-Chancellor Attila Brungs said the university apologised unreservedly to every current and former staff member affected by the underpayments, and that signing the undertaking was an important milestone but not the end of the work. The university's remediation program, known internally as Program Phoenix, covered pay between 1 January 2014 and 15 December 2023. Staff were told in an email on 9 January 2026 that the program would move to business as usual operations so that accurate pay, record keeping and assurance were embedded in everyday practice.

UNSW is not an outlier. More than a dozen Australian universities have entered enforceable undertakings with the Fair Work Ombudsman since 2022, and the regulator has secured court penalties against two others. On 21 July 2026 Central Queensland University signed an undertaking covering more than $1.3 million owed to more than 1,000 employees, including academic staff, vocational educators, professional staff and student residential advisors, with individual amounts up to $63,350 before interest and superannuation. That university attributed the failures to incorrect configuration of its payroll system, over reliance on manual processes, staff turnover and staff errors. It had back paid $1.2 million to 875 people by 29 May 2026, with 163 employees still owed $96,300 at that date. Charles Darwin University signed a similar instrument in June 2026 over more than $4 million owed to more than 800 employees.

The scale across the sector was already visible before these cases. In June 2024, Times Higher Education reported analysis by the National Tertiary Education Union finding A$204 million in confirmed underpayments across 29 universities, affecting roughly 124,000 staff, with a further A$168 million set aside by nine institutions for suspected underpayments not yet quantified. The common thread in the UNSW file is the one the court identified: where hours are casualised and recorded loosely, the losses are hard to see and harder still to prove.