Clerical workers to ‘lose $16,000’ under award plan: unions

Thousands of administration, banking and finance workers could be up to $16,000 a year worse off, unions warn.

ACTU secretary Sally McManus has sought to link the employer plan to the Coalition. Picture: Monique Harmer/NewsWire

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Hundreds of thousands of administration, banking and finance workers could be up to $16,000 a year worse off under an employer proposal for workers to give up penalty rates and overtime in exchange for a pay rise, union analysis claims.

The Australian Industry Group has urged the Fair Work Commission to introduce a 125 per cent exemption rate in the clerks and banking awards, removing the need to prescriptively record working hours, especially with more clerical employees working from home.

Under the proposal, workers would not be entitled to overtime, penalty rates, breaks and allowances if they earned 25 per cent more than the award rate.

Unions said the employer plan was an outrageous attack on the take-home pay of office workers across Australia.

According to a union analysis, a receptionist on $67,000, doing six hours of overtime a week, would stand to lose $300 a week, or close to $16,000 a year under this proposal. A senior administrative worker, who worked Tuesday to Saturday each week, would lose $7000 each year.

While the clerical award directly sets the pay and conditions of 70,000 workers, unions said the employer proposal would undermine the pay and conditions of about 720,000 clerical workers nationwide.

ACTU secretary Sally McManus said workers needed to earn penalty rates to “stay ahead of the price pressures we’ve all experienced”.

“People deserve to be paid fairly for staying back or working anti-social hours at night and weekends,’ she said.

“Penalty rates help workers in retail, admin, and finance – most of whom are women – to earn enough income to support themselves and their families.”

Seeking to use the case to attack Peter Dutton, she said during the last Coalition government, Mr Dutton “voted against protecting penalty rates eight times, after the Fair Work Commission cut penalty rates in similar circumstances in 2017”.

“If re-elected, businesses would pile on, in a race to the bottom to junk penalty rates just as quickly as they could line up at Michaelia Cash’s door under a Dutton government,” she said.

Finance Sector Union assistant secretary Nicole McPherson said granting the proposal would allow employers to pay a flare rate annualised salary to replace penalty rates, overtime, allowances and annual leave loading.

“The kicker is that this annualised salary would have 50 hours built into our normal working week. This means we could be expected to work an additional 12 hours per week. Make no mistake – we would be far worse off under this proposal,” she said.

Ai Group chief executive Innes Willox rejected the criticism, saying the only impact most employees were likely to experience, beyond their employer ensuring they were paid above any exemption rate set by the commission, would either be not having to submit timesheets or not having their hours of work closely monitored by their employer.

Australian Industry Group chief executive Innes Willox. Picture: Aaron Francis

“Sadly, (the union attack) is a blatant attempt to grab a headline during an election campaign rather than an acknowledgment of the need to align our outdated and notoriously complex system of awards with modern work practices and the practical needs of employers or employees,” he said.

“The FSU suggestion that people could be expected to work up to 50 hours per week under the proposal is simply dishonest scaremongering. No element of the proposed clause requires that any particular number of hours be worked. Nor does it permit an employer to require that additional hours are undertaken.

“The proposal is intended to make it easier for employers to pay people significantly above award rates and to enable employees who are often senior staff working with a high degree of autonomy to work in a more flexible way than is currently permissible under the awards.”