Job seeking can be a daunting task especially if your previous employment was ended abruptly and not on your terms and the extreme case scenario you had to hire an employment lawyer. This situation can sometimes not be avoided and the best thing to do is to get your head down and get on with the job of obtaining other employment opportunities and have a seamless transition into the new career.
In the mean time should your termination of employment was in your opinion unlawful you would want to get yourself industrial relations specialist on your side to guide you through the murky world of employment law in your country.
One of the first things you would want to look into is the contract of employment. It is at a heart of every country’s labour regulations and it governs the rights and duties involving the managers and their employees and even the independent contracting workers. Usually, alongside specific employment contracts, nearly all people are encompassed by combined certified agreements or quite a few awards. In legal terminology, recruits are bound by their contract of service or contract of employment and yet an independent contractor is connected to his so called contract for services. Casual employment contracts may also be protected by awards generally.
In contrast, independent contractors are normally not blanketed by legal minimum awards or equivalent workplace agreements such as what are known as Workplace Agreements and more recently brought in National Employment Standards. Building sector and construction contracts together with the transportation sector are the fields at which contracts for service are extensively used.
General basis of every employment contract is its terms and conditions. On top of these contracts, letters of offer and appointment, awards, job description and correlated statutes such is common law will shape the entire rules of anyone’s terms of employment. These conditions which are not inevitably published within every employment contract entail several rights and obligations. One example for this is the pledge of all personnel and professionals to retain vendors trade secrets undisclosed plus to exercise an acceptable measure of skill and attention while carrying out their occupation task.
A necessary fact worth mentioning is that every employment contract need to at least agree to if not exceed the basic 10 worker’s entitlements as stated in the Australian National Employment Standards (NES) guidelines. Each of these 10 entitlements are featured on Fair Work Australia website page.
What will happen whenever the employment contract is breached by either side? As with every other contract, being a legislative document agreed upon by two or more parties, violation of employment contract generally contributes to either party suing the opposite. The law suit would be seeking indemnity for breach of the employment contract. Most usual forms of conflict are violation of legal agreements where workers take strike and also other industrial actions. A different one is in which an employee sues the employer for underpayment of wage or unfair dismissal.
As an employer, your legally binding employment contract with your personnel need to hold conditions of employment part as well as include the contract starting date and the conclusion date if appropriate. Additional rudimentary features such as termination notice time frames and redundancy entitlements should also be a vital part of this legislative document.
Should you be a firm or a worker, you will need to go along with the employment laws in your own country. Organisations and corporations are more inclined to take on an employment lawyers such as McArdle Legal who can help them with drawing up interior human resources guidelines that is going to inline with up to date legalities.
The job is little more challenging for small businesses who employ other individuals, however, an employment solicitors from a law firm can readily be involved to support and create the internal policies.
The real undertaking begins once you are an employee; the job of grasping what contract, award or other employment law you come under is a stressful one. After you know what group you belong to, you then commence to grasp and know what your rights in addition to obligations will be under the administered law.
Fortunately for Australian personnel and also the organisations alike, from January 1, 2010, both the owners and employees are covered by the completely new laws in the national workplace system. This act is addressed as National Employment Standards (NES).
Precisely what this industrial labour law applies to is minimum of entitlements to sick, personal and annual leave, public holidays, redundancy compensation and unfair dismissal and notice of termination matters. Mainly because Australian government’s own website states that ‘in addition to the NES, people’s terms and conditions at the workplace may derive from a modern award, contract, pre-modern award and state and national laws’, let’s see what those National Employment Standards entail realistically.
What are the National Employment Standards?
You can find 10 core points in regard to employment laws in Australia, known as 10 National Employment Standards. Let’s cut to the chase and give overview of those 10 guidelines with a limited explanation of each.
1. Highest possible volume of weekly hours – precisely what is this number chances are you will ask; it is 38, with an acceptable additional hours.
2. Personal or carer’s leave – Australian employees are eligible for 10 days of what’s often known as sick leave. Physician certificate may be required by the employer for this leave to be paid. This is paid for leave.
3. Adaptable workplace arrangements – this primarily applies to carers or parents of pre-school children or youth and teens less than 18 years old who have the incapacity.
4. Parental leave – this allows new or otherwise moms and dads to get as many as 12 months of time off relevant to parenting.
5. Annual leave – nearly all Australian workforce have 4 weeks paid for leave every year with exemption of some shift employees who are given five weeks.
6. Long service leave – This normally implies that every person who’s worked for the same employer for more than ten years gets just about 8 weeks of paid leave.
7. Community service leave – This consists of unpaid leave to volunteer or as many as 10 days of paid for jury duty leave.
8. Redundancy pay and notice of termination – Generally terminology, this obligates a business to allow 4 weeks of notice to the worker well before the redundancy or other termination and up to sixteen weeks of redundancy pay, with respect to the length of service.
9. Statement and provision of Fair work Information – What this basically implies is that hiring managers should make new personnel aware of their rights through Fair Work act and the official employment laws, in Australia’s case – National Employment Standards (NES)
10. Public holidays – Compensated days off throughout Australian public holidays