This video explains how hours of work operate under the SCHADS Award, with a focus on how to correctly apply rules for day workers and shift workers. It covers the usual span of hours, how full-time hours can be averaged, and when penalty rates apply. The video also explains allowances linked to shift conditions, how client cancellations and makeup time must be handled, and the minimum requirements for time off between shifts and days off. It finishes by outlining meal and tea break rules and the SCHADS clauses that apply to remote work. The aim is to help employers understand how working hours flow through to payroll outcomes and compliance.
Day workers, shift workers, clients cancelling or rescheduling, meal and tea breaks, and time off. How exactly do hours of work work in the SCHADS Award?
In part four of the SCHADS Award course, we’ll break down hours of work and how best to interpret these so that you can pay your staff accurately and stay out of the crosshairs of Fair Work. Make sure you also check out our playlist containing the rest of the course. I’ve left a link in the description box below.
If you work in a business under the SCHADS Award and you need to include this as part of your CPD or need a certificate, we also have a paid version of the course that issues a certificate when you complete it. It includes bonus tools like our SCHADS compliance checklist to help with processing payroll, and we keep the course 100% updated as changes come through with the SCHADS Award. I’ve also left links to access it below. Let’s get started.
It’s hard to keep up with SCHADS industry award compliance when there are pages and pages of legal jargon, but either way it’s your job to ensure that you’re meeting payroll compliance. Otherwise, Fair Work will come knocking.
Welcome back to our SCHADS Award series. In today’s video, I want to touch on hours of work. Under the SCHADS Award, it’s common for day workers to spread their working hours across Monday to Saturday between 6:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m. This is the usual span of hours for day workers.
Full-time employees should work 38 hours within that usual span of hours. Those 38 hours are usually spread across five days, with shifts not longer than eight hours. If you really need your employee to work longer than eight hours on any given day, they must agree to do so in writing, and they can’t work longer than a 10-hour shift.
It’s possible to have day workers work in fortnightly or even monthly intervals. This means their hours are averaged across two weeks or four weeks instead of one week. If it’s a fortnightly schedule, a full-time employee must work 76 hours, or 10 shifts of not more than eight hours per shift. If it’s monthly, a full-time employee must work 152 hours, or 19 shifts of not more than eight hours per shift.
Because of the nature of the SCHADS Award and the different sectors that fall under it, most employees are likely shift workers. If an employee doesn’t work the usual span of hours between 6:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m., they’re considered a shift worker.
It’s important to know the difference because shift workers are paid different rates depending on the shift they work. Given the antisocial nature of shift work, many awards and agreements provide shift workers with an increased pay rate. This increased rate is generally referred to as a penalty rate or shift loading, and it’s your responsibility to ensure shift workers are paid the correct amount.
If an employee’s shift ends between 8:00 p.m. and midnight, they’re considered an afternoon shift worker and must be paid a penalty rate of 112.5% of their ordinary hours for the entire shift. If an employee’s shift ends after midnight but before 6:00 a.m., they’re considered a night shift worker and must be paid a penalty rate of 115% of their ordinary hours for the entire shift.
There are also specific allowances and additional rates you’ll need to pay shift workers depending on the nature of the shift. For example, do they need to sleep over, does the shift fall on a weekend, do you need to take the client on an excursion, or is it a broken shift? Make sure you go back to the second part of this course to refresh your memory on allowances and how they impact pay in addition to penalty rates.
For example, let’s say a level four classified full-time home care employee has a current hourly rate of $29.60. They don’t work the usual span of hours between Monday and Saturday, so they fall under the shift work category. For this shift, they worked a six-hour shift between midnight and 6:00 a.m., so they’re entitled to a penalty rate of 115% on top of their ordinary hourly rate. Their new rate would be $63.75 per hour.
They were then sent home for a three-hour unpaid break and returned to work for another four-hour shift between 9:00 a.m. and 12:00 p.m. No penalty rate applies to this shift, but it’s classified as a broken shift, so you need to add an allowance of $20.12 on top of their total shift rate. In total, for these two shifts plus the penalty rate, the employee would earn $42.50.
There are also rules around makeup time when a client cancels. If a client cancels or reschedules a home care or disability service within seven days, the employer can do one of two things. First, the employer can redirect the employee to perform other work during the rostered hours. In this case, the employee must still be paid what they would have been paid for the cancelled service or the redirected work, whichever is greater.
Alternatively, the employer can cancel the affected part of the shift or the entire shift. In this scenario, you must pay the employee what they would have received had the shift not been cancelled.
If an employer prefers to allocate makeup time instead, they’re allowed to do so, but there are conditions. The employee must be consulted first and given at least seven days’ notice of the makeup time. The new shift must be rostered within six weeks of the cancelled service. You’re not required to place the employee in the same shift or with the same client, but you must place them where they can competently perform their duties and ensure they’re paid the same as if they had performed the cancelled service.
Now, what about time off and breaks? All employees except casuals must have at least two full days off per week, or four full days off per fortnight, or eight full days in each four-week cycle. These need to be consecutive days off where possible.
Staff are also entitled to at least 10 consecutive hours between shifts. If it’s a sleepover shift, the staff member must have at least eight consecutive hours between when the night shift ends and the next shift starts. For example, if Lara worked a night shift and finished at 6:00 a.m., she can’t be required to be back at work before 2:00 p.m. on the same day.
When it comes to breaks, staff are entitled to meal and tea breaks under the SCHADS Award. An employee must take an unpaid meal break of 30 to 60 minutes if they’ve worked more than five hours. If they work through their meal break, they must be paid overtime rates until the meal break is taken.
For example, if Lara usually takes a meal break between 7:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m. but only takes it at 9:00 p.m., she must be paid overtime for the two hours between 7:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m. If the employee needs to have their meal with a client, they’re paid their ordinary rate and it’s counted as time worked.
For tea breaks, a 10-minute tea break must be given for every four hours worked. These tea breaks are counted as time worked.
In this last module, I want to briefly touch on some of the new clauses introduced into the SCHADS Award in July 2022. For example, remote work clauses were introduced as a result of COVID and the growth of remote work. Remote work is work performed outside a designated workplace, such as at home.
There are two primary minimum payments for remote work, depending on when it’s performed. A minimum of 15 minutes must be paid if the work is between 6:00 a.m. and 10:00 p.m., and a minimum of 30 minutes if it’s between 10:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m. If the remote work includes staff meetings or training, the minimum payment is one hour.
If an employee works continuously beyond the minimum payment period, the time must be rounded up. For example, if they work one hour and five minutes, it’s rounded up to one hour and 15 minutes. If there are multiple instances of remote work in a day, you must pay separate minimum payments each time remote work is triggered, unless it falls within the same minimum payment period.
For example, if there’s a one-hour minimum for staff training and the employee attends two training sessions within that hour, you only pay the one hour once.
Remember that penalty rates may also apply when staff work remotely outside their normal span of hours or on weekends. You can check these rates in previous sections of the course.
You may want to consider implementing a payroll system to help automate these calculations. That covers the basics of staff working hours. Let’s move on to the next module, which focuses on what you need to know when employees work overtime.
This video is part of our SCHADS Award training series, designed to help employers and payroll teams understand how the award works in practice.
You can watch the other modules in the series to see how hours of work, overtime, penalties, allowances, and compliance requirements fit together under SCHADS.
Watch the full SCHADS Award course.