Minister speaks on changes to Holidays Act
Stuff
What's your opinion on the Holidays act moving to an Hours based accrual System?
"Hours-based accrual has the potential to achieve a much greater focus on simplicity. “While shifting to hours-based accrual may require drafting a fundamentally different Bill, I believe investing the time and effort to do this will deliver superior improvements to both employers and employees."
The existing accrual process is stupid and actual accrual will be better.
I don't trust NActFirst to write this bill though. They're certain to erode protections for employees at the same time.
I'm with you, changes to simplify things are clearly needed, but allowing this government to completely rewrite the bill just seems like a bad idea.
Not sure if you linked the right thing, I just watched a nice announcement on toll roads, but yeah the holidays act is so complicated there are many government organisations (and private) that have had to pay millions in back pay for screwing it up.
There's also this weird accrual system where if you leave you get paid accrued leave but officially you can't use that leave if you stay employed until it ticks over to a new year and you get all of it at once. Of course many employers let you use accrued leave, but also many don't.
IIRC* the biggest problem with the holidays act and accruing leave is that the legislation refers to days and some people would work a 10, or 12 hour shift on a normal day, but when leave was accrued and/or paid out it was only on the basis of an 8 hour day which obviously screwed some people out of pay.
And then people who worked over time made things even more complicated especially if it was highly variable (like my work) where it was even harder to figure out what a normal day of work was and thus how many hours of pay to provide when taking a day of leave.
Almost all of that confusion has been resolved now though, so I'd imagine given the government legislating this its underlying motivation is to screw things back in favour of the employer and deprive workers of pay.
*I may be mis-remembering and aren't looking this up.
given the government legislating this its underlying motivation is to screw things back in favour of the employer and...
... Reduce costs. Nothing about this is to make it fairer for employees with tricky calculations, it's to make compliance easier cheaper and avoid having to back pay for mistakes.
Yeah, I think that moving to do it by time and not days is a smarter system, but I would prefer if a government trying to stop workers being screwed over was the one making the change, rather than one that wants to disadvantage the workers.
It was the live announcement url, Looks like they use the same url for other live broadcasts, I have updated it now.
Cool, thanks. Interesting that feedback on their new simplified changes had feedback from some that it was more complex and had higher compliance costs than the current bill.
I guess one challenge is that as bad as the current bill is now, all the current payroll software handles it OK, so any change will cause short term compliance costs. So minor changes aren't enough, they need to find enough benefit in changing to bill to justify the nationwide software update costs.
I've always had hours based accural? What's the alternative she wants to replace?
Under the Holidays act
All employees become entitled to 4 weeks annual holidays (annual leave) after 12 months of continuous employment.