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Comment by bigiain | Hacker News Reader

Where I am (Australia) an employer is not allowed to pay a salaried employee less than they'd earn working the same hours as an equivalent role paid on a per hour basis.

When I've had employers try to claim weekend/evening work was "theirs", I've sent them a link to that legislation and a pro forma invoice for all my time during employment with them for the difference between 168 hours per week at equivalent hourly rate and what they've actually paid me so far. That nicely sets the tone for further discussion.

(I only got threatened with being fired on the spot once for doing that, on which they did not follow through, and I was already interviewing elsewhere anyway...)

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> Where I am (Australia) an employer is not allowed to pay a salaried employee less than they'd earn working the same hours as an equivalent role paid on a per hour basis.

IIRC the wording in Australian legislation is that employers can require full-time employees to work "reasonable overtime". So that doesn't sound right - at least, not as a rule across the board. Perhaps under certain awards.

Even then, it's fairly useless wording. It does nothing to resolve disagreements between employer/employee as to what's reasonable. An extra hour once a year? 10 hours every week? Big difference between the two.

IIRC (usually) the "reasonable overtime" request is closely followed by a clause saying that, over the course of 4 months, you still must do an average of 38 hours/week or something to that effect.

How often it’s ‘enforced’ is, like you said, probably isn’t great

Australian employment law is the most bizarrely vague field I've ever come across.

"Reasonable overtime" is only one example - there's a whole host of other really basic questions that you can't get simple, definitive answers to.

For example, can I employ someone on a 12 month contract? What about 24 months? 36 months? At some point, they become a full-time/ongoing employee and get the benefits of unfair dismissal/redundancy, which means the whole "fixed-term" thing becomes meaningless. The problem is, it's never clear at what point that actually occurs.

Gut feeling is that this is because all politicians know it's an absolute minefield, so none of them is willing to touch it. Better to leave it vague enough that no-one can accuse them of favouring business or employees, because no-one really has any clue what's going on. Kick the can down the road and let FWA deal with it.

Do places actually offer fixed term contracts now? Last time I was looking at contracts I was stuck between recruiters/employers demanding an ABN and the ATO saying I wasn't eligible. The ATO were right because the work has to be performed on their equipment and on their schedule but most recruiters/employers hadn't adapted yet, so anyone without an ABN were SOL.

Yes this is still common and is covered by the ATO as the Personal Services Income test - you can either work via your own company or a payroll company but basically income is treated like standard PAYG

As far as I know, after working for more than 180 days in a tax year they become an employee.

Sounds like you're referring to the "employee" versus "contractor" question, which is a whole other distinction.

I'm talking about "full-time employee for a fixed-term" versus "full-time employee on an ongoing permanent basis".

In both cases, they're employees, not 'contractors' (so you withhold PAYG, pay their superannuation, etc).

But in the first case, you don't have an obligation to continue employing them after (say) 12 months.

The second, you are obliged to do so, so you can't turn around and say "we just don't want to employ you any more" after 12 months. You need to follow the redundancy provisions or terminate them for cause.

The problem is that it's not explicit whether businesses can actually offer the first type of contract (or more specifically, that if I employ someone on an 18-month, it's not explicit that they can't claim a redundancy payout when those 18 months end).

It's common for contracts to have a time-in-lieu clause. I worked late so I get some time off later.

For some, yes - but for others, no. I didn't have time-in-lieu at one of my past jobs.

Even so, as a matter of law, it's not required.

What does that mean. A contractor is paid more per hour than an employee. I don’t understand what a per hour project manager would be paid compared to an salaried employee, I’m pretty sure to be on an hourly rate you would be a contractor. I’m sure there are jobs that have an hourly rate like plumbing

Do you have a link to that legislation? I'm salaried in Australia and I've never heard of it.

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