May 5, 2023
The Fair Work Ombudsman has urged agriculture sector employers to prioritise compliance with labour laws.
The regulator has investigated 330 businesses in regional hot spots across Australia since its agriculture strategy began in December 2021.
Site inspections targeted employers in regions where intelligence suggested non-compliance may be common.
Fair Work Ombudsman Sandra Parker said the regulator’s agriculture strategy had highlighted the importance of employers following record-keeping and pay slip laws.
“Record-keeping is a bedrock of meeting workplace laws,” Ms Parker said. “Breaches related to record-keeping can indicate increased risks of underpaying, whether intentionally or not.”
Fair Work Inspectors have issued 64 Infringement Notices for pay slip and record-keeping breaches, with employers fined a total of $176,028.
Fifty-five of the Infringement Notices were issued to labour hire entities and nine to growers.
Ms Parker said inspectors had consistently found higher levels of non-compliance in relation to labour hire companies, as opposed to growers who directly hired workers.
“It’s a red flag if workers can’t identify their employer and are paid cash-in-hand, without pay slips, by individuals seemingly unrelated to the apparent employing entity. This is prevalent in multi-level supply chains where we consistently find wrongdoing,” she said.
Inspectors have also issued 18 Compliance Notices, 10 for underpayments and eight for non-monetary breaches. They issued nine of the Compliance Notices to labour hire entities and nine to growers.
Five were handed out on-the-spot during recent site inspections to employers who had failed to provide new workers with the required information statements.
“Failing to hand out the Fair Work Information Statement or Casual Employment Statement to new workers is no trivial matter,” Ms Parker said. “We expect employers to meet this legal obligation, which helps to keep their hard-working employees informed.”
She warned that unannounced hot spot inspections would continue this year.
Wouldn’t even cover their huge wages bill. They only chase the easy ones, normally a hard-working business who have overlooked one of the 60 thousand things they have to do to keep their businesses afloat.