Thousands of Illawarra workers could be in line to receive a share in millions of dollars of back-pay, after a court ruled BlueScope had been incorrectly calculating superannuation payments.
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On Wednesday, the Federal Court ruled BlueScope broke the law by not paying six of its workers superannuation contributions for the extra hours worked and public holiday pay components of their salaries.
According to the Australian Workers Union, which brought the case against the company, these six workers are typical of at least 3500 past and present employees who were on the same enterprise agreements.
Read more: Why BlueScope paid no tax
The AWU has calculated the six workers were underpaid between $2,239 and $11,416 between 2010 and 2016, with others likely to be owed similar amounts.
The union’s national secretary Daniel Walton said using these calculations, the total back-pay owed would be into well into the millions.
“[BlueScope] had calculated their super payments based off ordinary time, and not on their wage which included additional hours and public holiday payments,” Mr Walton said.
“What this does is provide for thousands of current and former workers at BlueScope the opportunity to regain thousands, or maybe into the tens of thousands, of dollars in unpaid super.
“While this isn’t going to put huge sums of cash into people’s pocket, because it will go straight into super, this is a really good thing for people’s future retirement.
“I’m sure there’s others around the country looking at this decision to see whether or not there have been miscalculations across other similar sites with similar rostering arrangements.”
Read more: It’s tonnes of good news for BlueScope
In his judgement Federal Court judge, Justice Geoffrey Flick, did not award any monetary relief, but said it was assumed the shortfalls in contributions would be rectified.
BlueScope was not penalised for contravening the Fair Work Act, as the judge believed the incorrect payments occurred “by reason of a genuinely held difference of opinion”.
Mr Walton said the AWU hoped to now work with the company to work out what is owed.
“We want to sit down and start discussions about how we can start transferring this money to current and former employees,” Mr Walton said.
“We will be contacting our members over the weekend and will sit down with our legal team next week to work out the next steps.”