Modern Award Lawyers in Melbourne

Your job title is not your classification

Modern awards decide the legal minimum for your pay, penalties, overtime, allowances and hours, and which of the 121 awards covers you turns on your actual duties, not the words on your business card. That gap between title and duties is where Melbourne employers lose underpayment cases. Think of the “assistant manager” doing the same floor work as everyone else, or the “consultant” who is really a clerk under the Clerks Award, or the chef sitting two classification levels below the kitchen she actually runs.

Get the award or the level wrong and every number after it is wrong too: base rate, Saturday and Sunday loadings, overtime thresholds, allowances. The exposure runs back six years. If reading that made you want to go and check your own payslip, that instinct is worth one free phone call to 1800 130 120.

”We pay above the award” is not the end of the conversation

A salary above the award minimum only works if it covers everything the award would have paid in each period: the ordinary hours and the overtime, the weekday shifts and the Sunday ones. When rosters drift toward nights and weekends, generous-looking salaries fall under the award line without anyone noticing, and every annual award increase keeps raising that line. We run the reconciliation properly, the same way the Fair Work Ombudsman or a court would, and tell you which side of the line you sit on.

Awards decide more than pay

Two consequences of award coverage surprise almost everyone who calls us. First, unfair dismissal: the $190,100 high income threshold does not shut out award-covered employees, which regularly revives claims for well-paid staff who assumed they had no rights. The 21-day deadline explained on our unfair dismissal page still binds them. Second, redundancy: awards impose consultation obligations before major change, and an employer who skips consultation can lose the genuine redundancy defence entirely. When a restructure lands on your desk, whether the employer followed clause-by-clause consultation is often the whole case. Plenty of the people who ring employment lawyers about a dismissal or a redundancy find the argument turning on which award covered them all along.

Enterprise agreements sit on top of this system, not outside it. An agreement must leave you better off overall than the award, and the law now expressly stops award penalty and overtime rates being cut or swapped for less. The award stays the floor underneath everything, and working out exactly where that floor sits for your role is most of the job.

Find out what you should actually be earning

One payslip, your letter of offer, and an honest list of what you do each week is all we need. On a free call, MK Law will identify your award and classification and tell you whether the rate looks wrong. If it does, we scope the recovery with you on that same call. The recovery itself, six years of back-pay with interest, is the whole subject of our penalty rates page. Call 1800 130 120 or use the form on this page before another pay cycle passes.