When I first heard about Katter’s Australian Party platform of lower penalty rates for small business I thought it was a good move, one I could support. Upon reflection, this may not be such a good move for us.
Imagine you’re a small retailer in a regional town with a regional shopping centre on the edge of town anchored with one of the major supermarkets and their partner variety / department store. Imagine area has relatively low unemployment. Imagine you’re looking for someone for Saturday and Sunday shifts and as a result of legislation giving you a different penalty rate compared to the majors someone working for you on a Sunday is paid less than working for a larger retailer.
The only way to address penalty rates is across the board, for all businesses regardless of size.
My issue with penalty rates is not related to business size. My concern is that we pay a premium for inconvenient hours, such as working on a Sunday. However, for many who work on a Sunday this is their day of work of choice or of necessity because of education and other obligations.
Many small businesses I know would struggle to attract good employees if they paid less per hour than other businesses nearby. Indeed, I expect that should legislation pass allowing small businesses to pay lower penalty rates many of us would actually pay the market rate just to attract good staff.
This issue is considerably more complex than the slogan of lower penalty rates and I hope that Bob Katter and his followers consider that as they embark on their election campaign.
My understanding is that if I employ somebody on a sunday they would be employed either as a casual or as parttime.
I have to pay them double time as per the applicable rate. Coles who open on a Sunday according to their employees dont pay double time. They are employed as a manager and therefore get a monthly or biweekly wage or as a partime employee and only get a small increase for working on a Sunday. Something to do with a work agreement. This is hearsay but could somebody tell me if this is possible and if it is how we can get the same deal.
Wally if you employed someone today on a Sunday then they would have to be one of three choices,
1. Full Time
2. Part Time
3. Casual.
You then pay them the applicable rate as dictated by the Award, the Last National Wage Case and the type of employment e.g. casual, part time etc. These rates from the Award are advised by the associations who interpret the Award to gives us our wage rates with the provision that they have been checked by Fairwork. This checking does not necessarily give a hard and fast guarantee as some one my come up with a more accurate interpretation. On Sundays the rate is called double time though in actual fact it is about 1.8 as previous wage cases in the past gave increases to base hours but not penalty rates. As a result in recent years in a lot of awards penalty rates have been slowly shrinking.
If an employe believes they have been shorted in pay they can complain to Fairwork and a Fairwork Inspector will then apply what they see as the best fit for the employee (award) concerned and hit the employer with a demand to pay the employee to what they believe the employee should have been paid if what you paid was less than what the Fairwork Inspector believes should have been paid. Fairwork has the right of entry and the right to demand records.
What I find particularly annoying about this is no where is the idea of productivity involved.
If you have a Work Place Agreement in Place with Staff you can pay as per the agreement however it must first pass the no disadvantage test where the Work Place agreement is compared to the award and if pays less than the award then it is rejected. A workplace agreement must not pay less than its award equivalent.
On 31 March 1947 the Commonwealth Arbitration Court decided to introduce the principle of penalty rates for weekend work. (Aplin et al 1987: p.163)
66 years later, how outdated is that! We’ve had 7 day trading for 30+ years and late night trading longer than that. Heaven forbid, even married women are allowed to work.
The post-WW2 era when the traditional male head of the family was the sole breadwinner and needed every extra shilling they could get has long gone.
Penalty rates and annual leave loading should have been consigned to the dustbin decades ago. As a small business owner the words ‘annual leave loading’ make my blood boil – it makes no sense to pay an employee more to go on holiday than to do their job! If I am correct in thinking this silly practice began during the great depression to compensate for overtime drying up, then it is also at least 66 years out of date.
Modern Awards = oxymoron!
Wally,
Coles does employ people under a work place agreement registered under FWA. It’s called the Coles Supermarkets Agreement 2011. They aren’t alone in having an agreement as several large employer groups inclusive of various levels of government can and do have them. All of the large supermarket chains and their repective corporate entities pretty well also all have them. You can find them all listed in their entirety including what they cover and the rates of pay and entitlements on the FWA site.
Like most of Katter’s ideas(policies?) It seems like a good idea at first glance but is actually bad. On top of discriminating against the employee’s of small business it will be like payroll tax where business’ will curb their employment to stay under a cutoff line mandated by government because taking the next step is to costly.
Thanks Peter and Paul. But how do we get the same deal. I guess my point is that there are different rules for the duopoly/big business. Not only do we pay more for our purchases but we pay more for our wages and occupancy costs. It is not quite a level playing field out there and the big guys are getting bigger as they take more business from the little guys. The only plus side is that the landlords soon wont have anyone else to deal with either. I would vote for anyone other than the Libs, Lab and the Greens. Is there someone out there willing to stand up for Australia rather than a party.
Wally Big Business has the resources to develop their own Workplace agreement/award (often of long standing). We as small business do not have this luxury. In theory the no disadvantage test should equalise these things out (usually to the higher standard).
Wally, I think you’ll find that these agreements end up costing large businesses more in wages. No union would sign off on them if they weren’t.