In the middle of a technology revolution, Australia winds the clock back to the dark ages of the industrial revolution
By Colin Weir, CEO & Founder Moroku
The pace of change is unrelenting. Everywhere we turn, the robots are taking over. Automating processes, externalizing services, removing danger, taking us places our ancestors couldn’t dream of.
In parallel the modern workplace has also transformed, epitomized by the show Silicon Valley, the epicenter of the change. As the world has seemingly become more dynamic, uncertain and chaotic, many of us have tried to understand what work life integration actually means in terms of policies and procedures. We’re trying to figure out how to allow the team to juggle all the things they need to and still let the company get done what it needs to. As with a black box, we’re making it up as we go along, hopefully going forward more than we are backward.
Enter the bureaucrat, completely befuddled by all this modern age gadgetry and lack of discipline and resolved to fix it and take us back to the future when we could measure everything and have more certainty.
Beginning from 1 March 2020, Australians who work under certain “modern” employment award schemes will have to start logging in order to be paid for all the hours they work. Employers, keen to compete on the international stage, attract and engage talent, will have to keep a record of the start times, finish times and unpaid break times for these employees, and have them sign these off each pay cycle. This will not only add a burden of extra paperwork but will also have a negative impact on flexible working arrangements.
As Employment Hero CEO and qualified solicitor Ben Thompson says “These new obligations don’t contemplate the realities of life and work in 2020, rather they force the vast majority of Australian businesses back to Bundy clock type systems that were popularised in the 1890s. In my opinion, this is crazy”
The impacts will need to be analysed for every business and Bundy clocks ordered. IT staff are covered under the Professional Employees Award. This isn’t listed as one of the awards impacted by these requirements, so it looks as though us FinTechs and other tech firms have no requirement to adhere to this. But all of us will need to spend cycles validating this.
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