Managing Minimum Wage Requirements For Piece Rate Workers
Insights and Updates
Brought to you by:
Dwight Sheltrown
Regional Account Executive
In a number of countries and states, labour regulations require employers to pay minimum wage rates. This can often be challenging when dealing with industries such as apple and cherry growing, where employees, or farm workers, are paid for the volume of work they do, versus the hours they work.
In fact, some in the industry would say that minimum wage regulations go directly against the motivation ethos of paying by piece rate, where those who perform well, earn high, and those that don’t, earn low. There is some concern that imposing these minimum wage conditions will lead to significant cost increases for growers, reduced work opportunities for pickers, and a huge increase in administration time required.
Regardless of any opinion, when regulation occurs, action to comply is critical.
Australia is one of the latest countries to experience the introduction of new fair work rules involving piece rate workers and minimum wage awards.
From April 2022, Australia’s regulators are requiring that fruit pickers on piece rate must be guaranteed a minimum wage as per the Horticulture Award.
The new regulation also requires employers to keep clear records of hours worked by pieceworkers.
In practice, this means that employers of pieceworkers need to:
Phew… That sounds painful!
Hectre supports the success of fruit growers all around the world and has tackled minimum wage regulations in other countries already, and has developed simple to use systems to take care of the issue.
The Hectre Orchard Management App digitally records all workers who are clocked in, captures the hours they work, the jobs they do, the pieces of work they complete (how many bins they fill etc) and then automatically calculates how much they’ve earned on piece rate, compares this against any minimum wage rates and where necessary, identifies that a top up is needed and calculates this amount as well.
All of this information is captured in the field and flows all the way through to the simple to view payroll reports on the Hectre dashboard, ready for payroll.
The Hectre app captures all hours worked by employees and all piece rate volumes, ensuring you’ve got great records that are easy to view. Super helpful for audits.
Brad Fankhauser, General Manager at Fankhauser Apples, shares how Hectre is helping to support his success:
“We’ve been using the Hectre Orchard Management App since 2016. Hectre captures all of the hours worked by our employees, so we’ve already got the recording side of things sorted. The app automatically calculates whether minimum wage requirements have been met. If an employee hasn’t met minimum wage, Hectre will use algorithms to automatically calculate the top up amount required for that employee. This will be highlighted in the payroll reports. So if we ever had someone not meeting minimum wage through their performance, we would be able to identify this easily and address it.”
If you’re needing to deal with minimum wage regulations, and would like to learn more about how Hectre’s award winning, simple to use orchard management app, can help save you from admin nightmares, contact our friendly team for a free, no obligation, 45 minute zoom consultation.
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