Entitlement

There are special rules in the Holidays Act governing the observance of the Christmas/New Year public holidays when they fall on a weekend.

Note:  This requires an individual assessment for every employee. Read more »

Employee does not work on the holiday

If an employee does not work on a public holiday, they are entitled to:

• Payment at their relevant daily pay for the day (ie what they would have got had they worked on that day), provided that day would otherwise be a working day for them, or
• A day off without payment if that day would otherwise not be a working day for the employee.

Relevant Daily Pay (RDP) is the amount the employee would have got paid had they worked on the day in question. Note that this includes productivity or incentive-based payments (including commission) and overtime payments that the employee would otherwise have received for working on that day.

If it is not possible to determine the employees RDP, then the employee’s Average Daily Pay (ADP) may be used. The ADP is determined by dividing the employee’s gross earnings over the prior 52 weeks by the number of whole or part days the employee worked to achieve those earnings.

Employee does work on the holiday

If an employee does work on a public holiday, they are entitled to payment for the time worked at the greater of:

• The appropriate portion of their RDP or ADP (less any penal rates) plus half that amount again, and
• The portion of the employee’s RDP that relates to the time actually worked on the day.

The first option in essence provides for payment at time and a half.  The second option is to cater for situations where the employment agreement provides for a higher rate of pay, such as double time.

Provided the holiday would otherwise be a working day for the employee, they are also entitled to a paid alternative holiday to be taken at a later date.

Please call if you require further advice.

When an employee is terminating employment they may be entitled to payment for public holidays occurring after the date on which they terminate.

A terminating employee is entitled to any public holiday which would have fallen during the employee’s annual holidays, had the remaining annual holidays been taken immediately after the date of termination.

So in essence, add the number of days of annual holidays that are outstanding to the employee’s termination date and the employee is entitled to any public holidays falling during that period.

Please call if you require further advice.

Few wage increases this year exceeded 3%, even though the CPI for the last 12 months exceeded 4% and peaked at 5.3% for the year to June.

The reason is that 2.52% of the increase was caused by increases in GST, ETS and tobacco tax, which as a matter of Government policy were offset by tax cuts of around 3% depending on income level.

So any increase of more than 1.5% provided for a real wage increase. Moreover the tax cuts are ongoing whereas the impact of the GST on the CPI will soon disappear.

Inflation is expected to reduce to around 2.6% for the year to 31 December and then continue to decline to around 2% by June 2012.

At the Ports of Auckland bargaining for a new collective agreement has broken down. The two sticking points are reportedly concerns some members are being disadvantaged by being removed from their existing contractor roles and opposition to non-union members receiving union conditions.

The Maritime Union has given notice of two periods of strike action on 1-2 December and 8-10 December.

The Port Company has retaliated by locking out employees for a similar period of time after each period of strike action ends, effectively doubling the period of time the port will be out of action.

This tactic is likely to become more common because it seems to work. It also proved to be effective in the Australian context with the recent Qantas strike.

However, the overall trend of the last 10 years has been a significant decline in strike action and we expect a continuation of this trend when the next stats are released.

In 2009 we purchased HR2GO, a business focusing on providing outsourced HR services through the use of specialist contractors.  From 1 December 2011 we are re-launching our client service offerings under two brands. Teesdale Loof retains its core services with HR2GO providing the specialist contractors, HR tools, learning and development programs and ‘Virtual HR department’ support to make your people management effort a success. We will be talking directly with you about the impact of these changes. Read more »

 The new Government campaigned on some significant changes for employment relations.

Collective Bargaining

• The requirement to conclude a collective agreement would be removed. There would still be an obligation to bargain in good faith but for the many employers with low numbers of union members they would at last have the power to end time consuming and expensive bargaining processes that only benefit a small number of employees.
• Where there is a collective agreement in place an employer would be able to employ new employees on a different basis (ie they would not be required to be employed on the terms of the collective for the first 30 days). This would return to employers a key method to achieve change where there has been a refusal to agree to more modern conditions. It also arguably gives more bargaining power to employees in an environment of skill shortages.
• Employers would also be able to opt out of multi-employer collective bargaining, instead of having to go through the charade of not agreeing terms in an expensive and protracted bargaining process.
• Where employees engage in partial strikes the employer would be able to reduce pay to the level that reflects the work still being performed. While this no doubt would cause disputes about the pay reduction applied in such circumstances, in principle it re-balances the right to strike.

Read more »

Changing times call for adaptation and the courage to change. Some years ago a Fortune Magazine study concluded that the #1 reason Fortune 500 CEO’s were fired was not a lack of good strategy but failure to execute change successfully. Collectively our team has been involved in over 100 change projects in recent years and it’s shaped our view of how to make change successfully.

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