Today’s Federal Court judgement reveals the Commonweath Bank knowingly engaged in wage theft and continued to steal the wages of its staff long after the bank’s management was informed about the outrageous scale of the problem.
Finance Sector Union National Secretary Julia Angrisano said the theft of more than $16 million from CBA staff over several years was first raised by the union.
“The CBA and Comsec used individual agreements to rip off workers and ignored our repeated attempts to have the matter resolved and the stolen funds returned,” Ms Angrisano said.
“The Bank knew exactly what it was doing but refused to acknowledge that its employment practices amounted to wage theft until the Fair Work Ombudsman became involved.”
“What we have now seen is the largest and most profitable bank in Australia forced to repay more than $16 million in stolen wages plus interest to more than 7,000 affected staff.”
“The CBA continues to make eye watering billion-dollar profits with $10 billion last year and another massive profit of almost $5 billion for the half just this week. It clearly can afford to do the right thing by its workers but instead chose to engage in a scheme to rip them off.”
“This was a systematic scheme to underpay staff by using individual flexibility arrangements (IFAs) which was supposed to remunerate employees with higher pay rates and bonuses in return for giving up annual leave loading, overtime pay, rostered days off and other allowances.”
“But what became clear to our members on IFAs is that despite this supposed benefit, their pay was falling below minimum levels.”
“This is one of the largest cases of wage theft yet detected in Australia and one which should be of concern to all workers. What’s worse is that once the details of this rip-off was raised with the bank, CBA lied to its staff and denied they were worse off.”
“The CBA case shows why it was important for Federal Parliament to pass new laws to make wage theft a criminal offence.”
“For Australia’s richest bank, fines alone were not enough of a deterrent to stop them from knowingly ripping off workers. Those responsible have avoided criminal responsibility this time so we’re calling on CBA boss Matt Comyn to take swift action internally, to hold them to account.”
Media contact John Hill 0412 197 079
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