Employment Contracts
Effective employment relationships are essential to the success of any business. Our role is to map out that relationship, foresee many of the issues that you will encounter as an employer, and to provide assistance by clarifying and hopefully avoiding disputes that may arise.
There is a huge volume of legislation impacting upon the employer-employee relationship. We can help guide you through that labyrinth to help you shape the relationship that you want, rather than accept a relationship imposed upon you by third parties.
The essence of a workplace lawyer’s task is to assist you to have clear, comprehensive and commercial agreements that are compliant with your statutory responsibilities.
Enterprise and Common Law Agreements
The traditional problem for many businesses, in a number of states within Australia is that there is no one award which adequately covers the work undertaken by people in these businesses. A business will often have two, three or even more awards covering it, depending upon its activities.
This has presented a problem with compliance for owners/managers, and has given rise to an unnecessary level of complexity in meeting their payroll obligations. The other issue (common to all industries) is that there are three or more sources of legal obligations in relation to employment arrangements - legislation, the prevailing award or NAPSA (if any) and the employment contract. It is now possible to unify all these into a single document known as a non-union Enterprise Agreement.
An Enterprise Agreement can cover all employees within a business, employees across multiple businesses, or only some of the employees within businesses. This introduces a simplification and uniformity to employment arrangements and allows employers to deal with matters that are not covered by the award, such as responsibility for payment of training costs, the implementation of drug and alcohol policies, protection of confidential information, and protection against (ex-) employees taking clients and business from you.
Common law agreements are applicable where workers would not normally be covered by an award. By delineating the employee’s obligations, your client’s business is protected against (amongst other things):
• claims for reasonable notice because the notice period is undefined upon termination (can give rise to six or even twelve months pay;
• the ex employees taking customers of employees; or
• exploitation of confidential information;
A common law agreement will also provide a clear outline of the employee’s duties and obligations.
How much? Enterprise agreement $2,500 – 4,500
Common law $800* – 1,800**
* junior employees
** senior employees