Full-Time Headache
For bureaucrats trying to review the Fair Work Act, and employers who must comply with it, understanding our awards system is an impossibly complex job. By James Mathias.
An investigation into Australia’s awards system will be initiated next year by the Minister for Industrial Relations, Christian Porter.
The announcement of the review is evidence that the Government is concerned that hiring, retaining and promoting staff has become too complex even for major corporations with HR departments, let alone small businesses owned by people unfamiliar with the door-stopping Fair Work Act.
“There are some awards — particularly those covering workers in hospitality, retail, restaurants — that may have a level of complication to them; some for example with more than 50 pay points,” Minister Porter told The Australian.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison told the Business Council of Australia on Thursday that the system needed to be simplified.
“I would hope we can make progress on reducing the system’s overall complexity,” he said. “While the number of awards has reduced, it appears that they have not become simpler.”
The number of awards has reduced from 1,500 in 2010 to 122 today, but those awards are for more difficult to understand. Some awards have thousands of pay scales.
The General Retail Industry Award 2010, for example, has 514 individual rates of pay for full-time employees depending on their age and the circumstances in which their work is undertaken. If the employee is part-time then there are more than 500 more individual rates to navigate.
This means a bedding store has more rates of pay for their employees than the thread count of their most expensive sheets.
The Fair Work Act, created by the previous Rudd Labor Government, is a deeply flawed document. At 214,000 words, it is bigger and arguably more complex than Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment.
Minister Porter’s proposed review may compensate for the inadequacy of the Act’s own inbuilt review process. Part of the Act stipulates that the nation’s awards must be reviewed every four years. The first review began in 2014, which was four years after the Act being passed by Parliament.
Five years later, it has not been completed. If reviewers who specialise in this kind of legislation cannot come to terms wit the awards, what chance has a cafe owner?
In a rare ticket of unity, unions and employer groups have joined to call on Government to an end this resource intensive process. The Government responded by abolishing the review process.
Minister Porter says he will deliver a discussion paper next year. Perhaps he will be able to incorporate the findings of the 2014 Fair Work Act review, assuming it has been completed by then.