Severance payments for part-time staff could be at heart of stoush
The ABC has responded to new allegations of underpayment after a media workers’ union claimed the company had short-changed staff in their redundancy entitlements.
In filing a notice of dispute before the Fair Work Commission, the group advocating for the workers – the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance – said “a number of members were not paid their redundancy entitlements in full” when the ABC calculated voluntary exit offers on a pro-rata basis.
The broadcaster, however, defended its severance pay system, stating that it “pro-rates the entitlement for periods of part-time service, as occurs in the case of leave entitlements”.
Such method, the company said, is “consistent” with its enterprise agreement which applies relevant provisions to part-time employees through a pro-rated system.
“Were the ABC to rely only on the employee’s hours of service as at termination, it would disadvantage employees who may have had prior years of full-time service and only recently converted to part-time hours,” the company said.
“Rather than only looking at the contracted hours at a point in time, the ABC considers the whole of the employee’s employment.”
The ABC said the system of calculation “has been in place for over two decades” and that it awards departing employees a maximum severance pay equivalent to 77 weeks for 24 years of service.
The company’s current enterprise agreement outlines how retrenched workers receive pay “equal to four weeks’ salary for every completed year of service for the first five years and three weeks’ salary for every completed year of service thereafter to a maximum of 24 years’ service”.
However, employment law expert Josh Bornstein, who spoke to The Sydney Morning Herald, disagreed with the ABC on its approach. “Employees are generally entitled to redundancy pay based on their salary as at the date of the termination of employment,” he said.
READ MORE: ABC enters into Enforceable Undertaking
Employees who voiced concerns about the ABC’s payout system said women are much more likely to be short-changed by the system of calculation since women tend to “reduce their full-time employment to part-time when they have children,” the SMH quoted sources who spoke on condition of anonymity. “To argue that these employees should be paid less for a few years of part-time service is absurd,” the sources said.
On the assertion that more senior women were being made redundant, the ABC said it had “not received any individual complaints about age discrimination in this process”.
“As a Commonwealth employer, the ABC is bound by the Age Discrimination Act, and takes any allegation of ageism and age discrimination in our workplace seriously,” the company said.
“In identifying redundant roles, we did lose a number of senior positions, which were inevitably looked at in the context of identifying cost savings, as well as workforce planning to ensure we had the right mix of senior and junior positions to fulfil the needs of the organisation.”
In June, the broadcaster entered into an Enforceable Undertaking with the Fair Work Ombudsman as the company paid out over $11.9m to more than 1,800 underpaid current and former casual staff, HRD reported.
