Over the past several months the Federal Government has made some important changes to employment legislation, including three areas, in particular, that may affect your domestic workforce.

Minimum wage increase

The first is the decision to increase minimum wages by 1.75%, which came into effect on November 1, 2020. The Increase affects hourly rates as well as public holidays and other penalties for all employees 21 years and over.

Pandemic leave

The Federal Government also introduced pandemic leave to certain ‘employment awards’, which states:

Employees who are employed under one of the affected awards can access up to 2 weeks’ unpaid pandemic leave (or more by agreement with their employer) if they’re prevented from working:

• as a result of being required to self-isolate by government or medical authorities, or acting on the advice of a medical practitioner, or
• by measures taken by the government or medical authorities in response to the pandemic (for example, an enforceable government direction restricting non-essential businesses).

The leave is available in full immediately to full-time, part-time, and casual employees – they don’t have to accrue it.

Employees don’t have to use all their paid leave before accessing unpaid pandemic leave.

While pandemic leave was originally considered as going to be a temporary inclusion, it is likely that it will remain in place for some time as the virus remains active around the globe, so it’s important that you know the rights of your employees, particularly if they intend to travel overseas, or host overseas visitors in time, when the international borders begin to slowly open up again.

Health and safety regulations

And the third is a range of new workplace health and safety regulations for domestic workers to avoid the spread of Covid-19. Safe Work Australia has published information for the implementation of a Covd-Safe work environment and recommends that employers implement a policy with guidelines they can share with employees.

If you’re not knowledgeable about each of these, then you could be acting unlawfully and putting your home help team at risk.

This is just another good reason to have our professional payroll team working with you. Aside from managing the day-to-day aspects of paying employees and ensuring tax and insurance obligations are met, we keep a keen eye on legislation and what the impacts may mean for our clients and their domestic helpers.

This means you don’t have to. We’ll keep you informed of any changes to payments so you can make the appropriate adjustments, and we’ll make sure that you have access to other rules and regulations that may affect you, such as those that have been implemented through Covid-19 and which are likely to remain a feature of our working and home lives now, at least until the pandemic disappears.

If you’d like more information, have questions, or need our help, please contact us.