Your award is decided by the industry your employer operates in, and your classification by the duties you actually perform. Job titles decide nothing.
How is an award identified?
By its coverage clause, which defines the businesses it applies to. Each award has a name, a reference code such as MA000009 for Hospitality or MA000028 for Horticulture, a coverage clause, and a classification structure.
The Fair Work Ombudsman maintains the public list and the current rates, free. Almost every pay dispute in this audience is really a dispute about which document applies.
What is the three step test?
Industry, then role, then level. Skipping straight to the level produces confident wrong answers, because the same level on two different awards is entirely different money.
First, the industry the employer operates in. A hotel is accommodation and hospitality. A stand alone cafe is the restaurant industry. A fruit farm is horticulture. Second, the principal purpose of your work: a hotel receptionist and a head office administrator at the same company are on different awards. Third, the classification matching the duties you actually perform.
A working holiday maker doing three jobs in a year is often covered by three different awards, each with its own rates and penalties.
Which awards cover most working holiday work?
A short list covers the overwhelming majority of 417 and 462 employment. Search the code beside each one for the current rates.
- Hospitality Industry (General) Award, MA000009: hotels, motels, hostels, hotel bars, function centres, caravan parks
- Restaurant Industry Award, MA000119: stand alone restaurants, cafes, brunch venues
- Fast Food Industry Award, MA000003: fast food chains, takeaway outlets, food courts
- Horticulture Award, MA000028: fruit picking, vegetable harvesting, packing, vine and tree work
- General Retail Industry Award, MA000004: shops, supermarkets, department stores
- Pastoral Award, MA000035: livestock work, broadacre cropping, shearing
- Cleaning Services Award, MA000022: contract cleaning and hotel cleaning through labour hire
- Building and Construction General On-site Award, MA000020: construction labouring and trades assistant work
What if your employer says no award applies?
It is almost always wrong. An award applies by default. There are three genuine exceptions: an enterprise agreement approved by the Fair Work Commission, a senior management role above the award's highest classification, or a genuine independent contracting arrangement under an ABN.
The third is where most real disputes sit. Our guide to the employee versus contractor test sets out how the line is drawn. Being handed an ABN does not by itself put you outside the award.
How is your classification decided?
By skill level, responsibility, whether you supervise anyone, and in some awards by industry experience. Classification follows duties, not titles.
A supervisor doing the same tasks as a Level 2 employee is a Level 2 employee. The reverse is more common: someone regularly running a section, prepping food or training new starters has outgrown the entry classification and must be paid the level the work corresponds to.
Most awards carry an introductory level for the first period in the industry, after which you must be moved up unless there is a genuine reason for further training. Keeping a backpacker at introductory rates for a whole visa is a breach in most cases, and it is widespread.
What does an enterprise agreement change?
It replaces the award for that workplace and must leave every employee better off overall. The Fair Work Commission applies that test on approval, and an agreement leaving workers worse off is not enforceable.
Agreements usually adopt the award structure and add higher base pay, extra leave or better penalties. They are common in large supermarket and hotel groups, so comparing a Coles or Woolworths payslip against the retail award rates can mislead in either direction.
What does the classification do to your tax and super?
It sets the wages you should have received, and everything else follows from that figure. Underclassification understates the income reported to the ATO and the 12% superannuation calculated on it.
Recovering the difference recovers both amounts, and increases the eventual DASP balance. Wages recovered are assessable in the year they are received, not the year they were earned.
Which award and which level are yours?
Both are determined by facts you can establish today. Getting them wrong is what makes an underpayment claim collapse before it starts.
- What industry the employer actually operates in, which decides the award.
- What your duties genuinely are, as opposed to your job title.
- Whether an enterprise agreement applies, which displaces the award entirely.
- How long you have been in the industry, which decides whether introductory rates still apply.
- Whether you are casual, which adds the 25% loading to every rate.
- Whether you are engaged under an ABN, in which case no award covers you and that is the first thing to resolve.
Whatever was withheld across each job reconciles at the end of the financial year, and you can estimate your tax refund from your year to date figures.