New Fair Work Ombudsman Anna Booth targets care sector

Anna Booth to seek greater collaboration with employer organisations and unions to ensure workers are paid properly.

New Fair Work Ombudsman Anna Booth.

Underpayment of workers in the care sector and the building and construction industries will be prioritised this year by new Fair Work Ombudsman Anna Booth who will more broadly seek greater collaboration with employer organisations and unions to ensure workers receive their legal entitlements.

Ms Booth, who has taken up the five-year appointment after more than 45 years’ diverse experience across industrial relations, said it was “quite a shock” to find the FWO recovered $17.7m on behalf of 7242 underpaid workers in the care sector last ­financial year.

She said the money was recovered without the care sector being a priority area, adding: “Imagine what we are going to be able to achieve once we start doing proactive audits.”

Ms Booth said increases in civil penalties and the proposed criminalisation of wage theft would act as a deterrent.

“This will get people sitting up and taking notice because money talks,” she said.

She said the litany of self-­reported multimillion-dollar ­underpayments by major companies was a positive as it finally showed they were waking up not just to their obligations but what they needed to do to comply with the workplace laws.

But she expressed some scepticism about employer claims that underpayments were the result of the complexity of the workplace system.

“It can appear complex when you look at it holistically but actually I think when you bring it down to the level of the individual workplace and, more importantly, the individual worker, identifying exactly who the worker is, what their hours of work are, what’s the rate of pay, that’s no so complex and some of the contraventions I’ve become familiar with in my first five weeks … are a failure to complete records at all,” she said.

“And I don’t think it’s too complex to ask someone to keep time and wages records which is, of course, both a statutory as well as usually an award and enterprise agreement obligation. I think that is sometimes an excuse.”

She backed assertions by her FWO predecessor Sandra Parker that many underpayments could have been avoided had big businesses meaningfully invested in regular auditing, properly calibrated payroll and record-keeping systems, and supported the teams who use them.

“We’re all human and so we find other people to blame for things that we do wrong, and in the case of at least some of the cases that I have seen since I’ve been here, what’s been done wrong is a view to invest,” Ms Booth said.

“So, much greater attention needs to be paid to these obligations. They need to be taken seriously. People need to live and breathe the human consequence of not taking them seriously.

“I’ve sat on boards, I’ve been on audit and risk committees. I’ve seen massive amounts of investment in the risk matrix to do with financial risk, to do with prudential risk on bank boards, to do with acquisition risk in due diligence when purchasing new businesses. And I’d like to see the same ­attention paid to paying people correctly.”

Ms Booth said the “big one thing” she would like to fully explore was greater collaboration between the Fair Work Ombudsman and the Fair Work Commission – and, beyond that, between the FWO and the workplace community, including employer organisations, trade unions and workers.