How to exploit your staff

If an employer can effectively invent their own pay scale, obfuscate any meaningful connection to employment legislation and not meet any of the minimum requirements as set out by law, they are free to continue to exploit their staff by messing with WHS law and safety in the workplace. 

Here’s a cheeky post I wrote to call out the practice.

As a small business owner I constantly found it hard to figure out how to pay my staff less. Of course I’d love to pay them more, but it’s just so expensive running an outdoor business (I mean there’s insurances, and equipment, and I’ve got a mortgage to pay, it’s hard to get by). But I really feel like my staff don’t understand how much hard work goes in to thinking about pay and conditions, so I thought I’d share with you all the thinking. (Apologies for the dot points, but there’s a lot to cover)

-          To get started, I decided that there wasn't any applicable award, which is good because then we’re not bound by all those complicated rules – they’re really hard to understand anyway, so it’s a win for employees. 

-          Next, I found an award that kind of sounded like it might apply and had a low hourly pay rate, and I justified to my staff that the pay per hour from that full time award was a good “benchmark” (but obviously the full award wasn’t applicable because we’re “award free”). (Incidentally, most of my staff are casuals, and it’s what they really want anyway because they like the flexibility)

-          The next thing I did was to decide to pay a “day rate”. It’s much easier for employees to understand a day rate, to compare themselves to each other, and it makes administration for me so much easier too. It also means that if I have a staff member who starts asking questions about pay and conditions, I can afford to give them a pay rise to keep them happy and it won’t impact the bottom line too much for me.

-          (And to make staff feel like they’re getting a really good deal on day rates, I also throw in “prep days” as a full day pay. Even though they only work from midday, they get paid for the full day. What a deal for them! We usually finish up at about 8pm, but I throw in a staff dinner – something affordable like a BBQ and salads – as a bonus for them too of course.)

-          Speaking of food, I factor in the cost of food and accommodation into my staff pay and conditions. So while our pay might be a little low, when you include the food and accommodation then it’s actually a really good deal.

-          I mostly avoid the issue of Superannuation. I don’t pay it for as long as I can (I need the cash to offset my mortgage) and then when I do pay it, I make sure that all my staff have to use my nominated Super Fund (otherwise the admin work is too expensive. And it’s much easier for them to manage their super than for me to do that for them).

-          Sometimes I charge staff for uniform, but it’s really good quality stuff (it’s a requirement of the job that they wear it anyway), and because we’re not covered by an award I don’t have to worry about the Laundry allowances that are in most awards. 

-          I certainly don’t waste any money on investing in the professional development of my staff. If I started investing in their growth then they’d expect me to actually pay for the maintenance of their competency and the qualifications they need to work for me, and I could never make it work. It’s bad enough that they’re pressuring me to provide them with first aid kits now, we never had that kind of support when I started out. Employees these days really don’t know how good they’ve got it. 

-          (Speaking of how good they’ve got it, you need to remember how bad it is for me! My costs have gone up with inflation alone by over 60% since the year 2019! There’s no way that I could keep pay increases at pace with that when I have so many other expenses.)

-          We don’t have many staff meetings or training, but when we do (they’re obviously compulsory) I put on pizza and beers to make it worthwhile for the team (but we don’t pay them because they’re not actually doing any work)

-          We used to have weeklong staff inductions (they were unpaid because we didn’t know if staff were any good yet and they were effectively getting free training from us), but now staff expect us to pay them we’ve decided to either:

-          a) only take on trainees (they’re much cheaper to pay and they stick with us for the full length of the traineeship – so many of other staff just don’t last)

-          or b) just put staff straight into the field (and I’ll tell you what, TAFE doesn’t train them like they used to! The quality just isn’t like it used to be)

I’m sure there are a few other things that we do (for instance I know we used to just get staff to send us an invoice to get paid), but they’re the mains one that I do now.  After all, it’s the only way I can afford to stay in business and make sure that we can keep doing all this good work delivering outdoor experiences for people who would otherwise have to miss out!

*This post is not directed at any employers in particular but rather is an attempt to call out some entrenched and damaging narratives in the outdoor community.* 

N.B. I was, but am no longer, a small business owner in the outdoor industry. And I certainly wasn’t a perfect employer! I still had lots of areas I could have done better in.