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A childcare company that is being paid $26 million to acquire 31 underperforming centres from ASX-listed G8 Education and has previously run into multimillion-dollar financial woes, has now been accused of not paying its staff their wages and superannuation on time.
The union representing childcare workers, United Workers Union, last week fired off a missive to Genius director Darren Misquitta, claiming that staff across the country had been paid up to five days late on multiple occasions and that some employees had not been paid their superannuation entitlements for more than six months.
Darren Misquitta, director of Genius Childcare.
Tara Harper, a former educator at Genius Corinda in Brisbane’s south-east, said in the five months she worked for the company, she had been paid late five times. Harper resigned last month, saying she could not live with the uncertainty of not getting her money on time.
“Each fortnight, I’d stress and worry if I was going to be paid on time or not as I have a young family and enjoy doing things on the weekend,” Harper said.
“This restricted me from doing those things as I didn’t have the funds to do this, or the fuel. I was also unable to pay my mortgage on time, and being paid on a Friday it was impossible for me to contact my bank or anyone to say I was going to be late on payments. We never received any emails to explain what was happening. We were left in limbo, never an apology. Nothing.”
Harper said she had not yet been paid any superannuation, and claimed seven of her colleagues had quit since the start of the year because of the pay issues.
In its letter to Misquitta, the union said the issues were not resolved even after educators raised them with their supervisors and managers. Genius sent emails and text messages to staff acknowledging the issue, but did not provide a full explanation, according to the union.
In a statement to this masthead on Tuesday, a Genius spokesman said there had been delays in some payments to staff in the past six weeks.
“These have all been brought up to date, or are in the process of being brought up to date,” the spokesman said. “We have communicated to all staff who have experienced delays. To ensure this does not happen again, we have engaged a new third-party payroll processor to bring all payments up to date, and we are hiring additional administrative staff.”