In July 2019, Fair Work found George Calombaris’s MaDE group guilty for underpaying staff to the tune of $7.8m. The order required a $200,000 fine, apologies to appear in multiple media releases and for George to personally conduct several speaking engagements over 3 years to promote compliance within the restaurant industry. If you see George around promoting compliance, you know why.
$7.8m! How is this possible? Such a large business unaware of the requirements? How were the staff working for his businesses unaware of their entitlements under the award?
Are any of your staff being paid annual salaries? Do you know what was required? Do they?
The Restaurant Industry Award 2010 is complex and contains 7 different base rates of pay and 23 different job classifications. In addition, 12 different penalty rates need to be applied under certain conditions. For permanent staff members the award defines full-time and part-time employees and the requirements for their employment including average hours, overtime hours, and penalties rates to be applied to their base rates. In the situation a permanent member of your staff is employed under an annualised salary arrangement the award specifies the minimum requirements and ensures that the employee is not worse off than if they were not paid under this arrangement.
So how do businesses big or small ensure that they maintain compliance with the award?
We have found staff management software like Deputy helps to automate this process as it has implemented awards like the Restaurant Industry Award 2010 into the software. Deputy enables each employee pay to be automatically calculated based on timesheet with the relevant daily ordinary base rate, penalties and overtime rates applied. As an employer, all you have to do is to check that employees sign in and out for their timesheets. Simple!
On top of that, Deputy integrates with accounting/payroll software like Xero so your employee’s award compliant pay is seamlessly processed on each pay run. If you find yourself struggling to pay your employees correctly, call us now so we can help you.