Almost daily, we read about employer failure to comply with
award or enterprise agreement obligations. Opportunistically and in
keeping with the sport of "business bashing”, the
failure is termed "wage-theft", as if to brand every
failure deliberate and deserving of criminal sanction and as if to
assume that compliance is easy.
I'm not here to condone such failures. The law is the law
and it should be observed.
And it’s quite possible that in many organisations
compliance has been taken for granted relying on payroll systems,
often outsourced, to ensure employees are paid that which they are
due.
The vast majority of failures will be inadvertent. I say this
without the benefit of any data, but relying on anecdote and
experience. And I'm speaking here of larger employers, being
the end of the market we represent. Much of the business-bashing is
from the ill-informed, or the well-informed but
politically-motivated.
