Staying on top of HR compliance, HR Governance and national WHS rules and regulations – which are particularly critical in the Australian mining, logistics and civil construction sectors – can be challenging.
Constant legislative and regulatory changes mean ensuring your organisation stays compliant can be time-consuming and costly.
HR compliance and HR governance spans your treatment of workers, your hiring practices and contracts, your organisational rules, and includes the need to meet Australian industry-specific employee-related regulations, standards, awards, and laws.
Australia’s Workplace Health and Safety (WHS) laws require businesses to provide safe work premises for full-time and part-time staff and contractors, visitors and volunteers, and assess and manage workplace risks.
Outsourcing your recruitment to a labour hire firm, which is akin to having your own HR department or hiring an HR consultant to provide specific advice, helps make meeting this long list of ever-changing legal and regulatory demands simpler.
HR & WHS Benefits of Labour Hire
When employing people through a labour hire agency, these workers are not employees of your organisation. This setup provides your business with greater flexibility to scale team numbers up and down as needed, reduce the time spent on recruitment and find the best people for the job.
It also means your company will have a work agreement with the labour hire agency, who will have an agreement with the worker. These contracts are managed by the labour hire firm and will include details such as work duties, hours, workplace policies, compensation etc, and need to comply with Australian law.
This arrangement means the labour hire agency is obliged to meet any employee rights and entitlements. This puts more of the responsibility for WHS, HR compliance and HR governance onto the agency.
At RecruitWest, our recruitment, labour hire, human resources and Workplace Health and Safety services can be uniquely packaged and customised to suit the needs of each client.
Keeping Abreast of HR Changes
RecruitWest has recently implemented a raft of changes to ensure HR compliance, HR governance and WHS compliance for us and our growing client base.
- Domestic violence leave
Recent changes mean all employees (including full-time, part-time and casual) can take paid (10 days) or unpaid family and domestic violence leave each year. This is now a minimum leave entitlement, like sick leave.
- Superannuation
To ensure ongoing payroll compliance with statutory payments, we have recently implemented a 0.5% increase for superannuation. This is in line with the federal superannuation guarantee rate rising from 10.5% to 11% from July 1, 2023.
- Payroll tax
As of July 1, 2023, the WA payroll tax rate is a minimum of 5.5%. The maximum rate for employers or groups of employers is 6.5%.
- Workers’ compensation
The rising cost of workers’ compensation insurance has prompted us to recently implement mandatory price increases of 0.2%.
- Award minimum wages
The Fair Work Commission, as part of its latest annual review, has increased the modern award minimum wages by 5.75%, effective July 1, 2023. We have, therefore, reviewed our pay schedules and applied adjustments where applicable.
Making HR compliance simpler
Working with RecruitWest makes HR compliance simpler as we calculate all costs for our clients and charge a fixed rate fee for our professional services, making budgeting easier.
We understand the significance of attracting and retaining skilled, dedicated workers to help companies best manage a range of situations, such as the need to ramp up staffing levels to complete projects on time and on budget, and to cover leave and short-term vacancies.
While unearthing the right staff is always a challenge, it’s more difficult than ever due to the skilled labour shortage impacting most industries in Australia. This makes our service more vital to companies.
The importance of the role labour hire firms play in supporting the smooth operation of a range of sectors explains the business community’s widespread concerns over labour hire laws proposed by the Albanese government.
RecruitWest is also well aware of the benefits of employment via labour hire agencies for skilled workers demanding more job variety, growth and flexibility and we’re pleased to help meet this need.
To support both businesses and workers, RecruitWest is committed to providing competitive and compliant pay rates and ensuring compliance across all aspects of our operations, making life easier for companies and individuals.
RecruitWest. We get people.
Get in touch with us today.