66,000 NAB workers owed $169 million in mass underpayment

Résumé détaillé

The bank first reported problems to the regulator in 2019, but did not fully fix them for another seven years.

The National Australia Bank has formally conceded it underpaid 66,000 of its workers $127 million over 14 years, with some workers owed more than $87,000 each as the result of problems that dragged on for seven years after the bank first reported them to the federal watchdog

NAB will repay a total of $169 million to staff, including superannuation and interest. It will make a record $2 million “contrition payment” to the Fair Work Ombudsman to effectively settle the legal side of the issue.

The issues stemmed from NAB’s failures to check it was paying staff at least the legal industry minimum under its pay deal with workers, to track staff hours and to correctly apply entitlements such as penalty rates. The bank first reported the issues to the regulator in 2019, but failed to fully fix them and the problems continued until this year.

Fair Work Ombudsman Anna Booth said companies had to invest in getting pay right.

“That’s showing... respect to workers who, just because they work for a bank, doesn’t mean they’re wealthy,” Booth said. “They have to pay their rent and their mortgages and put food on the table for their families.”

On average, affected staff will get about $2000. Fair Work Ombudsman inspectors had to examine 550,000 lines of payroll data to verify the underpayments. They were spread between issues such as incorrect base pay for part-time staff, which accounted for $37.9 million of the underpayments; problems with fortnightly pay calculations, which was $16.4 million of the total; $5.7 million of insufficient superannuation for staff on parental leave.

Booth said that when problems at large companies were not addressed over a long period “they become diabolical”.

Numerous other major institutions, including universities, law firms and retailers, have confessed to large-scale underpayments. NAB made $6.1 billion in profit on $22 billion in revenue last financial year.

Despite the contrition payment representing about 0.03 per cent of NAB’s annual profit, Booth…

Début de l'article, extrait de The Sydney Morning Herald. Pour lire la suite, ouvrez l'article chez le média.