What we can do in the wake of the Fair Work Penalty Rates Decision?

pink little birdie said :

A job that is mainly Monday to Friday and paying over time for project is majorly different to businesses that are weekend businesses.

Weekend businesses do not operate only on Saturday and Sunday, but all week long. They open on the weekend obviously because there is more money to be made on those days. To not pay the staff the extra money for helping the business make extra profit is just selfish. If the business can’t handle penalty rates in its wages, especially with the pathetically low wages in the retail industries, then opening on the weekend is a poor business decision.
What about the shops in centers like the Fyshwick and Belconnen markets? They only open from Wednesday to Sunday, having two days off every week but on different days to the rest of the world. Do the shops there have to pay their employees penalty rates for Saturday and Sunday? My guess is no. It might be a weekend for everybody else but it is a normal business day for the owners.

pink little birdie said :

In the case of students, particularly ones that are doing subjects with full time placements (teaching, nursing, medical schools), they are doing a full time load at university and working part time to fund their full time studies.

Pay rates for students is a different argument. Should they be paid penalty rates simply on the basis that that they have chosen to study during normal working hours? That is the student’s choice. If they need to work for double time and can’t survive on anything less, then that should have been part of the factored into their decision making process before they enrolled to university. If study and working to survive was such a fine balance, then maybe study wasn’t the best option for them. I mean, if you can afford to pay the ridiculous uni fees necessary these days, then you should also have been able to save enough to compensate for the lack of income during that course period as well. To expect society to provide them with a job that caters specifically to their situation is a little entitled in my opinion. Everybody wants a job that has minimal hours for maximum pay, but by becoming a student you need to consider lack of income is going to part of that reality.

It looks like I have actually made an argument against keeping penalty rates, even though I am in favor of them. it is a very expansive subject with so many things to consider. The only reason it has become an issue though, is the state of the economy and employment rate today. With wages stagnating, cost of living getting ridiculously expensive and unemployment rising, everybody is looking for more money to make ends meet. That means taking on multiple jobs and looking for better pay rates. This means we are even more in competition with each other for a slice of the wages available in society, trying to beat each other to the best paying jobs or to a second or third income stream. Of course lower pay means fewer vacancies as they get snapped up by job-seekers. Employers can pick and choose from the abundance of desperate Newstart recipients, knowing that whatever the pay rate there will be someone who wants to work it. With less surplus money in people’s wallets, profits are doomed to fall, which then makes paying overtime even harder. It’s a vicious cycle that seems to be spiraling downwards. None of the government’s “jobs and growth” promises have eventuated in anything tangible to pull the nose up of this plane, which is going to crash into depression if left too late. It is up to them because students, weekend workers, business owners and everyday Aussies cannot create change when their purse strings are tightened further, whilst big business, the banks and elected government members who are supposed to be representing the people, fatten their bellies on the ridiculous profits and salaries earned by taxing the working man to extinction.

bd84 “If you’re reliant on an allowance to make ends meet, you have major problems and may need to get advice to help live within your means.”
When I went back into the workforce and after my ex deserted me and the kids, I did depend on those penalty rates to survive. Now I can see from your comment you are rather arrogant when it comes to your earning power over those who earn less than you but there are many people who are starting out after disastrous circumstances (no fault of their own) and these penalty rates are important. They are at least not sponging off centrelink and I think you may have not thought of this point so will give you the benefit of the doubt here.
I feel for anyone who has to lose this money if in terrible circumstances, who want to work and not live off welfare. I admire them for doing so and can only wish them the best after this blow.
Maybe this move should have been thought out more by those who care instead of ignoring the fact that these hard working people are at least giving it a damn good go instead of bludging off the system…

I hate paying a surcharge on Sundays at various cafes. Happy to see penalty rates paid for people doing actual overtime, on top of a day or a week’s work, but I don’t think uni students and other casual workers should be paid double.

wildturkeycanoe said :

The industry I worked in was a Monday to Friday job. When you were asked to work overtime, be it after hours or Saturday/Sunday, you were compensated for having to sacrifice your own free time to do extra work. I do not consider that someone who only works Saturday or Sunday and only works 10 to 20 hours a week deserves one and a half or double time, because they haven’t done a full week of work to deserve the bonus of sacrificing their free time. They are still only doing half a week of work compared to ordinary 9-5 employees. Just because it is a weekend, does not on its own mean you are entitled to compensation because you haven’t done any hard yards yet.
I had a very unfortunate situation happen to me once. I’d started work on a Monday and done the normal 8 hour day. I had been asked to work night shift that night as they needed more help on that particular job. Now everyone else had been doing this regular night shift work for a few weeks so they were used to the hours and were getting single time with a loading for the shift. I went to bed in the afternoon after knocking off at 3:30PM, to rock up to the shift job. We did this night job for the rest of the week and the following Tuesday I checked my pay packet. I had only been paid a normal week’s wages plus 20% for the shift. I inquired about why I hadn’t got double time for the first night shift as I’d not had the mandatory 8 hour break from the previous day work. Because it was a different project manager running this job, he simply told me he didn’t care about what I’d done that day and that the shift allowance would apply only. Id done over my 40 hours for the week, the extra hours normally would have been at x1.5 or x2, but I only got 20% shift loading instead. Needless to say I didn’t show up for that project the following week, not just out of protest but because the lack of sleep and time to adjust to the shift-work made me sick anyway.
Now I might not be taking about the same thing. Are overtime rates and penalty rates considered as the same thing? There was a rule that if you’d not done your 40 hours normal time in the week, you weren’t allowed to do overtime on Saturday or Sunday because technically you weren’t doing overtime, just filling in the hours you haven’t done. The basis for calculating penalty rates for casual and part time employment is outside this scope because the employees don’t do that prerequisite working week to get the bonus in their pay packet. Why get double time for Sunday if it is the only day you work in the week? Doesn’t make sense. Give it to someone who has done 40 hours already and needs the extra money.

A job that is mainly Monday to Friday and paying over time for project is majorly different to businesses that are weekend businesses.

In the case of students, particularly ones that are doing subjects with full time placements (teaching, nursing, medical schools), they are doing a full time load at university and working part time to fund their full time studies. For those on unpaid placements (2-8 weeks) they often loose their part time shifts they can do during the week and still need to work on the weekends at part time jobs to pay for essential living costs. This makes that even harder.
What if you work 2 part time jobs that get you to full time hours and pickup an extra shift at one. Which one should pay the additional hours if you work over the 40 hours- you haven’t gone over the 40 hours at one job but have in total?
It’s not as black and white as the 40 hours a week at a particular job and then you get penalties.
It would also lead to the abhorrent practice where hours are artificially limited to avoid paying penalties like some companies in the USA where hours are artificially limited to avoid paying benefits.

Your experience does not reflect the world for people who are working in retail and hospitality in particular.

The industry I worked in was a Monday to Friday job. When you were asked to work overtime, be it after hours or Saturday/Sunday, you were compensated for having to sacrifice your own free time to do extra work. I do not consider that someone who only works Saturday or Sunday and only works 10 to 20 hours a week deserves one and a half or double time, because they haven’t done a full week of work to deserve the bonus of sacrificing their free time. They are still only doing half a week of work compared to ordinary 9-5 employees. Just because it is a weekend, does not on its own mean you are entitled to compensation because you haven’t done any hard yards yet.
I had a very unfortunate situation happen to me once. I’d started work on a Monday and done the normal 8 hour day. I had been asked to work night shift that night as they needed more help on that particular job. Now everyone else had been doing this regular night shift work for a few weeks so they were used to the hours and were getting single time with a loading for the shift. I went to bed in the afternoon after knocking off at 3:30PM, to rock up to the shift job. We did this night job for the rest of the week and the following Tuesday I checked my pay packet. I had only been paid a normal week’s wages plus 20% for the shift. I inquired about why I hadn’t got double time for the first night shift as I’d not had the mandatory 8 hour break from the previous day work. Because it was a different project manager running this job, he simply told me he didn’t care about what I’d done that day and that the shift allowance would apply only. Id done over my 40 hours for the week, the extra hours normally would have been at x1.5 or x2, but I only got 20% shift loading instead. Needless to say I didn’t show up for that project the following week, not just out of protest but because the lack of sleep and time to adjust to the shift-work made me sick anyway.
Now I might not be taking about the same thing. Are overtime rates and penalty rates considered as the same thing? There was a rule that if you’d not done your 40 hours normal time in the week, you weren’t allowed to do overtime on Saturday or Sunday because technically you weren’t doing overtime, just filling in the hours you haven’t done. The basis for calculating penalty rates for casual and part time employment is outside this scope because the employees don’t do that prerequisite working week to get the bonus in their pay packet. Why get double time for Sunday if it is the only day you work in the week? Doesn’t make sense. Give it to someone who has done 40 hours already and needs the extra money.

I’d like to point out that the proportion of workers who work weekends/outside business hours has not actually changed in the last 40 years despite the increase of opening hours.
I also take the view that the penalty rates have been around long enough that either you survived the transition to pay penalty rates and succeeded or your business is under 30 years and it should have been planned for.

Generally speaking a 15 year old working weekends or evenings will still be earning less than the adult minimum wage regardless of penalties because of the age based awards.

There is also a lack of discussion, particularly in Canberra where university students are a large part of the part time and weekend workforce, that working more than 15 hours a week starts to have a negative impact on grades. Canberra in particular has a lot of rural students and Youth allowance is too low for even a basic standard of living so they need to work.

And finally if people are using the lack of religiousness as an argument for lowering Sunday penalty rates can we stop using religion to base any laws on?

The arguments in favour of penalty rates sound completely inconsistent to me.

By all means argue for higher minimum wages but how can.anyone argue that penalty rates compensate for giving up Sunday when there’s a preference for Sundays and the extra money?

whilst not entering the debate between whether penalty rates should be cut or weekday rates increased, it has always seemed unfair to me that the teenager who worked Thursday nights and Saturday mornings made almost as much as the average worker who worked longer hours on Monday to Friday…

People need to stop conflating penalty rates and welfare. Penalty rates are supposed to compensate people for working outside normal times and/or longer than normal hours and are quite frankly designed to encourage businesses not to operate at certain times – thus the term “Penalty Rate”. Welfare is supposed to provide a safety net to ensure a basic standard of living for those who can’t provide for themselves. The argument that Sunday penalty rates can’t be cut because it will reduce pay to low paid workers is an illogical/emotional attempt to link two separate issues.

The big question faced by the Commission was whether there was still a justification for higher penalties on Sundays than on Saturdays. The original justification for higher rates on Sundays compared to Saturdays had to be religious, but church attendance is at all time lows and so that difference between the two weekend days should no longer apply. I’d argue that it is now normal, and has been for years, for many businesses to operate on weekends and so the penalties for both days should be reduced further. I’ve said previously that higher rates of pay for late night work should still apply as working those sort of hours comes with adverse health results, and if a person works more than the standard 38 hour week they should be paid at a higher rate for the additional hours or get an equivalent amount of time off in lieu.

There’s also a lot of hypocrisy from Labor & the Unions on this issue when they’ve negotiated agreements with big employers to reduce or even scrap weekend penalty rates in exchange for increases in the base wage, but these agreements are still reducing the total wages bill of the employers. For example the agreement with McDonalds in 2013 was estimated to have ripped $50m p,a, from workers pockets, all coming from the wages of low income earners working weekend shifts. Many people are quick to criticise small business owners for trying to make a profit and telling them to close their business if they cant, but in the face of those sort of deals they were getting screwed in trying to compete. The difference is in future they won’t be getting screwed quite as much.

I have sympathy for people who genuinely will find it hard to manage due to reduced Sunday penalty payments, but not just those affected by the recent Fair Work decision – there are also those whose weekend penalties have been reduced in earlier deals between employers and unions. The “trade off” in those deals may have been a higher standard hourly rate – which would benefit all workers covered by such deals, including those who actually do little or no weekend work.