Assumptions
- Assumes 8 hours worked on each public holiday over the long weekend.
- As most business are generally closed Good Friday, typically with the exception of fast-food outlets, Good Friday has been included in the calculations as a fraction of a public holiday, proportional with the percentage of all affected workers that fast food workers represent.
- Worker is assumed to be low-level non-managerial. This means this may be a conservative estimate.
- As the decision only affected level 1 Fast Food staff, the proportion of workers on that award that are at Level One was sourced from the SDA and was assumed to be 90%. Non-level 1 staff were not included
- As the decision only affected permanent staff in Hospitality, casual staff were removed from the workforce number for that award using the % of food service and accommodation workers who do not have paid leave entitlements according to ABS Characteristics of Employment August 2015 (CAT 6333.0). Casual and part-time staff were assumed to be evenly award-reliant.
- The award reliant staff are the same figures we’ve used throughout our campaign, now adjusted for the nuances in the decision as outlined above.
- States were allocated a proportion of the national figure on the basis of the proportion of the national ‘Accommodation and Food Services’ and ‘Retail Trade’ workforces that their state contains. Example: NSW has 30% of the national workforce across those groups, therefore they were allocated 30% of the wage losses.
- The proportion of award-reliant affected workers who are likely to work on public holidays for each award was, due to a lack of reliably sourced and accredited data about workforce participation on public holidays, based on the proportion of workers in a relevant industry grouping who currently work weekends. It was assumed that workers working weekends were likely to be willing and able to work public holidays. For each award the industry groupings are:
- Retail (General) Award – ‘Other [than food] Store-based retailing’
- Pharmaceutical Award – ‘Pharmaceuticals and other store-based retailing’
- Fast Food Award – ‘Cafes, restaurants and take away food services’
- Hospitality Award – average taken from ‘Food retailing’, ‘Accommodation’ and, ‘Pubs, taverns and bars’ and ‘Clubs (hospitality)’.
- Each state’s wage losses are based on the number of public holidays granted in that state over the Easter long weekend. Easter Tuesday in Tasmania is not considered to be a public holiday as it only affects the TAS public service and select other EBAs. This can be changed but would affect the figures only slightly.
- All losses are based on a worker going from their current normal public holiday rate to the new lowered rate. Any special losses introduced by Sunday public holiday rates are not included as this adds an extreme amount of complexity.
