Blog

By Paul Ackerman Businesses in Australia are becoming subject to an increasing focus on incidents of wage theft. The Fair Work Amendment (Protecting Vulnerable Workers) Act of 2017 has introduced significantly higher penalties for a range of contraventions. Fines of up to $630,000 for a company and $126,000 for an individual now apply in relation […]

By Paul Ackerman The Fair Work Commission’s annual wage review decision came into effect from 1 July 2018. The decision delivered a 3.5% increase to both the national minimum wage and the minimum wage for all modern awards. The new national minimum wage will move to $719.20 per week or $18.93 per hour. This represents […]

By Paul Ackerman In recent months the Fair Work Ombudsman has begun auditing one thousand businesses across Australia as part of a new campaign to ensure employers have the basics right in their workplaces. Whilst many business owners may think they are doing everything necessary to meet their obligations, preliminary findings from the Workplace Basics […]

In this video blog, Natasha Hawker discusses succession planning with Geoff Green of author of Smart Business Exit

By Nardia Vescovi-Diss Having gone through the suggestions in our previous blogs, having a clear policy, having those first difficult conversations, perhaps invoking your drug testing policy, you now know that your employee has a problem with drugs.  So where to from here? You understand that supporting and promoting employee health and wellbeing is not […]

By Nardia Vescovi-Diss Great work, you’ve got your policies and procedures in place regarding Drugs and Alcohol, you’re taking a preventative approach and building it into your recruitment and wellbeing strategies, and all of your team have signed off that they understand the policy, all sorted!   And then, one of your Managers calls to […]

by Nardia Vescovi-Diss OK, so you’ve decided that it’s time to make sure that you’ve got your Work Health & Safety (WH&S) obligations covered, your WH&S policy is sorted, safety officers are in place, someone’s been trained in first aid, fire and emergency evacuation, you’ve got your Workcover insurance, even an Employee Assistance Program (EAP), […]

by Nardia Vescovi-Diss Unless you’ve been somewhere with no access to the outside world over the past few years, you will be aware that drugs in our society are an escalating issue. There is still a perception held by some people that the issues are limited to certain ‘sections’ of society, either geographically, culturally or […]

By Nardia Vescovi-Diss. I bet you used to think that using Independent Contractors was easy. Essentially, they needed to be working for you for no more than 80% of the time, have an ABN and invoice you for the work, and – bingo – you had an Independent Contractor.  No need to worry about PAYG, […]

By David Brown So you have have carefully studied the arrangements you have with your independent contractors and taken some good advice to protect yourself from the argument that you may be “Sham Contracting”.  You can now sit back and breathe a sigh of relief that they are responsible for all their benefits, right? Not […]