The Fair Work Ombudsmans 2018-19 annual report summary

By Ciaran Strachan

The Fair Work Ombudsmans 2018-19 annual report is out.

The broad strokes are:

– From 2018-19, the FWO answered more than 383,000 calls mostly from employees and their reps (70%).

– The most common enquiry types were: entitlements, wages & termination.

– Inspectors issued almost half a million of on the spot fines for pay slip & record keeping breaches.

– More than 40 million for 18,000 underpaid employees was recovered. Of which, 26.9 million was recovered through education & dispute resolution.

– Over 50% of litigations filed involved fast food, restaurants and café’s. Compliance activities indicated that on average, only 45% of businesses were compliant in these sectors.

The most common issues within the fast food, restaurant and café sector were:

– Award coverage,
– Pay (hourly rate underpayments totalled 33% of all non compliance. Incorrect penalty rates accounted for a further 10%),
– Pay slips and record-keeping (failure to supply pay slips in their prescribed form totalled 23% of all non compliance),
– Salary payments,
– Hours of work and
– Calculating leave.

For the remainder of 2019 and in 2020, the FWO will target high risk sectors such as fast food, restaurants, café’s, horticulture/harvest trail, supply chain, franchisors and sham contracting.

The full report can be found here.