“When I was a journalist, back in the Cretaceous period, we had rosters that required work on public holidays – even Christmas – because a paper was published on Boxing Day. But our award at the time dealt with that by giving us an extra 12 days of annual leave.”
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Now, to your specific question about whether your relative could have signed away his entitlements in an agreement. Well, if you’re talking about statutory rights, the answer, says Professor Munton, is no.
Even if this job exists outside the award system, it’s bound by the National Employment Standards. Although these standards don’t guarantee penalty rates for public holidays, they do “guarantee a paid day off if the boss doesn’t request that you work for a good reason”.
“We can’t just sign away [such protections] by entering into a contract that undermines them. However, sometimes statutory entitlements are drafted in a sufficiently fuzzy way that they can be affected by individual agreements,” she says.
“So, in this case, the fact that the obligation to work on public holidays was put into a contract and agreed to by the employee, means that the employee has had a lot of notice of the requirement. The ‘reasonableness’ factor going to whether notice was given has probably been satisfied here.”
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“It is possible that the arrangement could still be challenged, though, if the contract breaches an applicable award, or if the contract is unreasonable in some other respect – perhaps because the wage rate is low, and there is no trade-off by way of more other days off.”
As always, with questions that relate to the legal side of work, we can’t offer specific advice and, as Joellen told me, even if we wanted to, it would be difficult to be definitive “without a lot more detail about the nature of the business, the particular role, the remuneration structure, other conditions of work, such as annual and personal leave entitlements”.
These are details we’re unlikely to mention in Work Therapy because they risk the anonymity of the reader (or, in this case, their loved one). If, after reading this response, you still feel something isn’t right, my advice would be to have your relative consult with a lawyer.