Wondering where last week's pay went? You're not alone

Australian workers are rejoicing at new laws passed by the federal government that will grant the right to disconnect and avoid unnecessary communication about work outside of office hours, as well as minimum standards granted to gig workers.

But in their newfound freedom and relief, people from the Australian Public Service to retailers, manufacturers, healthcare workers and more might find time to reflect on the fact that their more flexible employers probably aren't correctly paying them.

A report from the Fair Work Ombudsman highlighted it recovered $509 million for more than 250,000 underpaid workers in 2022-23. This is a mere fraction of the real issue as it only reflects cases reported to the Ombudsman.

The systemic issue goes far beyond the highly publicised wage theft scandal impacting a wide range of employers including Woolworths, Optus, CommSec, Bankwest and MasterChef Australia judge George Calombaris' Made Establishment company. Our systems are such that, if you're on the payroll in Australia, the chances are you're not getting the right paycheque.

But it's not all bad news; the law of averages would suggest many Australians are actually getting overpaid - a far less discussed issue - but one of equal importance from employers' perspectives.

So, why is this happening? Employers don't typically set out to deliberately underpay or overpay their staff.

No matter what direction their moral compass is facing, even a modern-day scrooge would be wise enough to know it isn't worth being caught on the wrong side of Canberra's Fair Work Commission.

The reason for this systemic failure is simple: disconnection. Not between our private lives and work, but between awards, enterprise bargaining agreements (EBAs), and organisations' workforce management and payroll technology systems.

EBAs are negotiated, documents are signed, and payment is configured into the organisation's workforce management and payroll systems.

But in my entire career, I've never seen these processes seamlessly linked to each other.

There is never complete traceability or accountability between these three people payment pillars to ensure employers stay compliant and workers are paid the right amount.

It doesn't take much for the lines between EBAs and actual pay to become blurry - warm-up breaks for packers working in the freezer, an increased rate for unexpected public holiday work, transitioning between casual employment and any number of thousands of work variations that can happen at the coal face and affect the EBA the worker is under.

To fix this, we need to take a number of very achievable steps. EBAs first need to be developed, read and understood at the industrial relations (IR), human resources (HR), operational and legal level within organisations, compliant with their own policies as well as Fair Work's.

From there, EBAs need to be tested against a wide range of workplace scenarios likely or even unlikely to impact the agreement.

This requires a lot of heavy lifting at a manual level, but somewhat ironically given fears around its disruption to jobs, AI could do this heavy lifting for us through advanced modelling scenarios.

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The final step is the crucial traceability component. A software layer, also likely leveraging artificial intelligence (AI), could track any changes to the organisation's operations, workers' own roles, or Fair Work policies, which regularly occur.

This would alert an organisation when there is a need for a revision or tweak to the EBA to ensure the worker is paid correctly, and the organisation remains compliant.

I've worked and consulted in the broader workforce management and HR technology space for more than 20 years, and I can assure you such a system does not exist and is much needed. There is a growing chasm of mistrust between employee and employer and no amount of Canberra's workplace reform will change that until employers' ledgers are clear and Australians are paid what they're owed.