Know who you are working for

Why is this important? Because this is the company that pays you money! This company should appear on your payslips, on insurance policies, on official letters, etc (we will talk about many of these later), and it is also the entity that any formal correspondence (legal, complaints, etc) should be made to and any official enquiries should be made about.

Basically, whoever you are working for should provide you with an ABN (Australian Business Number). If this matches up with the business name you are working for then you are probably in the right place. For example, the company I used to own – Blue Mountains Adventure Company - is not actually a company, it is just a trading name. But there is an organisation that owns the trading name (it also happened to own other trading names) and it has an ABN.

You don't need to know the detailed ins and outs of the entity you work for (who the directors are, what the legal structure is, etc), but you do need to know a name and an ABN. It is a legal requirement for a business to hang a certificate of business name registration in their office (Of course, many outdoor businesses don’t have an office that the staff access, so that makes this a little hard!). You can do a search with the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC asic.gov.au) based on this info and check out the company and ABN. This information should be on your payslip too.

A side note: Working For NON-Australian Companies (Foreign Entities)

If you find yourself working for a foreign company on Australian soil, then there are also lots of complexities that I don’t fully understand, but here are some things where I would draw the line:

• Pay (including Superannuation) and conditions can’t be any worse than what you would be entitled to if you were doing the same job for an Australian company. Any less is illegal and undercutting jobs in this country.

• I’d want some sort of surety that I was going to get paid. It’s hard enough making a complaint about an Australian company, let alone a foreign one that doesn’t have to answer to our courts. Find out how pay disputes are resolved if Australian laws don’t apply.

• Know the tax implications – you might find that the government wants to tax you more for foreign income.

• Make sure that they have an Australian Workcover Insurance policy and that it covers you!

If you are travelling overseas I would encourage you to look very carefully at the protections afforded to you. In particular make sure that you look at Workers Compensation type insurance, how pay disputes are resolved, what currency you’re paid in (and the tax implications!), if superannuation is paid, and most importantly look very carefully at the support you get on the ground: legal, financial, medical, communications, etc. The last thing you want is to find out that you are all alone with no help in a remote place in a foreign country.