Home About Our Blog Public Holiday Pay - Doing it Right

Easter is coming and with it a range of public holidays. The public holidays that are upcoming in the next month or so include: Good Friday, Easter Monday and 25 April (Anzac Day).

 

All employees in Australia are entitled to a day off on a public holiday, regardless of the industrial instrument they are employed under or what you have written into their Contract of Employment. 

 

 

If you want to request your workers to work on the public holidays, there is a certain way you should go about this.

 

If your request is reasonable, there is no reason why your employee should not comply. If the employee feels that your request is unreasonable, they may refuse. You as the employer, can not exert undue influence on your workers to make them work a public holiday, additionally you can not take any adverse action against an employee because they refuse to work on a public holiday.

 

An employee is not entitled to payment if they do not normally work on the day of the week, that the public holiday falls on. However if they do normally work this day, they are entitled to their base rate of pay as long as they are not working on the actual holiday. The base rate of pay will be for ordinary hours worked and exclude incentive-based payments, bonuses, loadings, monetary allowances, overtime and penalty rates.

 

If you have requested your employee to work and they have agreed, you will have to refer to the applicable industrial instrument that they have been employed under to ascertain their rate of pay.

 

If this is something you need help with; that is exactly the service that Nine2Three HR Management Solutions provides. We work with our clients to advise them on correct rates of pay and minimizing risk through Fair Work compliance and smart human resource management.

 

And if you are an employer who is grumbling that Australia has too many public holidays, or a worker who is grumbling that we do not have enough – when compared to the rest of the world, Australia does not even make it into the top ten for number of public holidays!

 

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