By David Bowser. Founder & CEO
This is not a story about bad employers. It is a story about what happens when the systems underneath a payroll cannot keep up with the agreements sitting on top of it. The detail below is Australian, but any system that combines complex academic workloads with collectively bargained pay will recognise the pattern.
Between 2019 and 2025 the Fair Work Ombudsman recovered more than $218 million for over 110,000 people working in Australian higher education, including $67.9 million in the 2024 to 2025 year alone. Individual institutions are repaying tens of millions of dollars to tens of thousands of staff. Around 18 university matters remained open in the public domain late last year.
Those numbers have crossed a threshold. At this scale, workload is no longer a matter for a human resources committee. It is a balance sheet item, a governance risk, and increasingly a reputational one.
The pattern behind almost all of these cases is remarkably consistent. Workload allocation is managed in spreadsheets, or in tools never designed for the job. Those tools cannot handle complex workload formulas, and they certainly cannot handle several enterprise agreements interacting across different categories of staff. Record-keeping is then rebuilt after the fact, from memory and email, when someone asks a hard question.
The failure is almost never a decision to underpay. It is an inability to show, clearly and at the time, who was allocated what, against which agreement, and at what cost. An institution that cannot demonstrate that is exposed regardless of its intentions.
So far this has largely been a university problem. That is changing. Australia's revised Standards for RTOs, the national rules governing registered training organisations, raise the bar on quality and on evidence, and they ask providers to show their performance rather than assert it.
The discipline that universities are now being forced into by the Fair Work Ombudsman is the same discipline the new standards ask of TAFEs and independent providers. Different regulator, same underlying requirement: know what your people are doing, and be able to prove it.
This is the problem Curio Opus was built to solve. Opus brings workload allocation into one place and makes it visible: who is doing what, how it maps to their agreement, and what it costs. The record is auditable rather than scattered across spreadsheets and inboxes.
Two things follow from that. Staff can see that their workload has been allocated fairly, which is the reason most institutions started caring about this in the first place. And the institution holds the evidence to prove it, which is the reason the rest of them are catching up now.
Opus is used across Australian TAFEs and universities, including Victorian institutes such as Chisholm and William Angliss, to manage complex staffing and delivery planning across multiple campuses and disciplines. At Chisholm, a major Victorian TAFE, it has reduced planning cycle times and improved the transparency and equity of workload allocation across teaching staff. Faster planning and a cleaner evidence trail turn out to be the same project.
The uncomfortable truth in the Fair Work figures is that most of the institutions involved believed they were compliant. They were not being dishonest. They simply could not see their own operations clearly enough to know otherwise, and neither spreadsheets nor good intentions gave them any way to find out.
Workload is no longer just a question of fairness. It is a financial and regulatory one, and it is heading for vocational education next. The institutions that get ahead of it will be the ones that can see their allocation clearly, and show it.