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If you employ staff on weekends, you need to read this! A number of staff have taken pet businesses “to the cleaners”!

Two Boarding Kennels and a number of grooming members have accidentally fallen foul of the Fair Work laws in relation to penalty rates.

To stay out of trouble DO THIS:

1. Penalty rates ARE payable to staff on Minimum Wage or equivalent

2. You CANNOT get out of this by having an employment contract with the staff member stating that no penalty rates are payable, even if they sign the contract

3. You CANNOT get out of this by employing as casual, or part-time.

4. You GENERALLY can’t get out of this by employing staff as contractors. A contractor, by definition, can work for other people including grooming and boarding and other animal businesses, which results in a clear Biosecurity risk (and in some cases a risk of the staff member contacting your clients as well in a massive conflict of interest). You CANNOT require a “contractor” only to work in other-than-animal businesses, if you do so it’s “sham contracting”, which is illegal.

You CAN reduce your penalty rates by:

a) Blending penalty rates into your general pay rate. For example, if the general pay rate is $25 (example only!) and penalty rates would cost you an additional $10, it may be possible to make your general pay rate at $27 with weekends built in. THE TEST THAT FAIR WORK USES is that the employee should be NO WORSE OFF OVERALL– in other words, add up all the rates and all the hours and average it out so the employee is no worse off.

b) Staffing differently at weekends. Businesses have to pay higher rates at weekends because weekends are considered “special family time”. Do you like to work weekends? If not, then that’s the reason why weekends are considered “special family time”. One way to reduce penalty rates is to staff weekdays and work weekends yourself – BUT – you then MUST take two other days each week away from the business to avoid burnout.

c) Use your Juniors at weekends and your full-priced staff during normal business hours

d) Go on the attack – make your business really fly on weekends to make up the penalty rates. This may include higher prices on weekends to offset the client convenience of being able to have their dogs groomed without the diary difficulties that busy clients have during normal business hours.

Pets Australia is looking at the option of developing enterprise bargaining agreements. If you are interested in this option contact the office.