Meeting with IR Shadow Minister Tony Burke

NATIONAL

Once the specified period for these protections expires, Members can seek to engage in the ‘capabilities dismissal’ process to terminate an employee on the basis of their inability to perform the inherent requirements of their position. This involves conducting meetings with the employee regarding their fitness to perform their role, obtaining medical information and considering and implementing reasonable adjustments.

Disciplinary action

If absenteeism is due to deliberate lateness without reasonable, acceptable excuse or deliberate non-compliance with rostered start time or with policies and procedures, Members may wish to engage in disciplinary action to address such misconduct. Such disciplinary action can serve to re-communicate expectations surrounding timeliness and compliance with procedures. Terminating an employee pursuant to an escalation of written warnings can reduce a Member’s unfair dismissal risk. An appropriate disciplinary process allowing for procedural fairness is recommended. Any disciplinary outcomes, such as written warnings, should only be issued after procedural fairness has been allowed, and these warnings should be maintained on file.

Elements of a procedurally fair process include:

• Providing reasonable notice of a disciplinary meeting; • Permitting a support person should the employee wish to bring one; • Providing reasons as to why the employee is invited to a disciplinary meeting; • Allowing the employee an

opportunity to respond and provide explanations to all allegations of misconduct; and • Not arriving at a pre-formed conclusion as to a disciplinary outcome before allowing the employee to provide their response.

MGA TMA has recently conducted a webinar on “Dealing with Absenteeism in the Workplace”. Check out our website for details.

Should you require any assistance, please do not hesitate to contact the Legal and IR team on 1800 888 479.

If you wish to discuss pay and leave entitlements please contact

MGA’s Legal and Industrial Relations

team on (03) 98324 4111 (option 1)

MGA is a Council Member of COSBOA and attended a recent virtual round table meeting with Federal Opposition Industrial Relations Minister Tony Burke.

MGA and COSBOA were members of former Attorney General and Industrial Relations Minister Christian Porter’s IR working groups. This included working across Award Flexibility, Casual Definitions and Compliance and Enforcement. The purpose of the working groups was to enable simplification and complexity reduction to enable employers to employ more people and offer additional working hours in a post-COVID era. Shadow Minister Burke, whilst acknowledging the challenging post-Covid times, was not overly supportive of this initiative and instead offered his own views toward how employers could be incentivised to employ more people and offer current staff more hours.