subject: Unfair Dismissal Small Businesses Stand Up And Take Notice [print this page] Business owners are required to think about and contend with other many fast changing variables. Most of these variables they have control over and dependant on their size, they can easily adapt to suit. However When talking about government policy and implementation, control, other compared to their individual right to vote will go completely out the window.
Government policy and regulation naturally will change over time depending of those flavour of Which side of politics currently holds the balance of power, plus a ideal example of this relates to unfair dismissal claims for little business owners.
It is arguable that the previous liberal government under the guidance of Howard pushed the bar at the same time far at the employers favour by raising the small company threshold to 100 employees. This meant that In case you were utilized by a organization that had less than 100 employees you did not have access to unfair dismissal claims. This was rather a large spike in comparison to 20 employees.
Prior into the Howard changes, little businesses usually located it much more price effective and convenient to simply pay out compensation to unfair dismissal claims rather then Finding bogged down in the bureaucracy and expenses of defending them and loosing concentrate on their other company goals.
When the Labour government was elected in 2007 under the leadership of Rudd, Among the first reforms that was introduced was a brand new Federal Industrial Relations system by introducing the Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth) to parliament.
This legislation amongst other things, introduced the small company Dismissal Code Which switched the threshold back down to 15 employees to be classified as a big enterprise in relation to unfair dismissal. That meant it was possible for any local franchise to be under the same risks and rules regarding unfair dismissal as big multi-national corporations.
Small businesses need to take into consideration that for the purposes of qualifying towards the little business dismissal code, they are going to as well need to count the wide range of regular and systematic casuals that they engage. As an example if a business has 10 full time employees and 10 casual employees working 20 hours a week each, that company would not qualify towards the small organization dismissal code and could be treated much like Multi National Corporations towards the purposes of unfair dismissal.
It seems that our federal governments seem to be with a challenging time discovering a happy medium between employee and employer both swinging the pendulum as well far one way or the other.
Length of service is Yet another crucial issue to think about when examining unfair dismissal for little business. If your organization qualifies Depending on the wide range of full time and regular/systematic casuals, an employee would have to work for your company to get a period of much more than it is 12 months to qualify for protection for unfair dismissal legislation. However if your enterprise doesn't qualify towards the little business code, then the length of service required for protection is only 6 months.
This in itself poses some interesting questions in that it effectively cancelles the validity of those Common 3 month probation clause inserted into several modern employment periods. This period is successfully stretched to 6 or 12 months Based on the size of those business.
