According to the Association of Graduate Students Employed at McGill (AGSEM), the new Workday HR and payroll system used by McGill University in Canada would not have paid its teaching assistants.

Workday is a cloud-based system that is in place since August 2020. It was replacing a Banner Human Resources Information System (HRIS) and Payroll One-Time Payment System (POPS), which were seen as outdated by the university in question.

Back in October, the university stated that there were no issues with McGill’s payroll system after transitioning to Workday. However, it reported some difficulties with hiring and onboarding processes for new employees, which resulted in delayed pay for some teachers.

However, the issue was only considered as an isolated technical problem or a misunderstanding or repetition of certain errors by users at the time. It would also seem that banking details were missing for some users.

Yet, in December, the association declared that the problems were not individual but affected at least ten departments.

Moreover, it was also reported that the Workday system doesn’t supply pay stubs that are compliant with the Labour Standards Act. Therefore, teaching assistants are expected to complete the same onboarding as a full-time staff member, creating confusion among the employees. The Workday system is also apparently in violation of AGSEM’s Collective Agreement concerning the application process and notification of the application’s outcome.

After these findings, the university declared it would fix the situation in October and then in November. However, by mid-December, no concrete actions were taken. Since then, McGill stated that all issues around new hires were resolved and are working on solving new cases.