Penalty Rates and Underpayment Lawyers in Melbourne

The same rate on Sunday as on Tuesday is usually an underpayment

If you work under one of Australia’s 121 modern awards, your Saturday, Sunday, public holiday, overtime and night hours almost certainly attract loadings above your base rate, and casuals earn a 25 per cent loading on top of whatever else applies. The national minimum wage is now $26.44 an hour, and award minimums rose with it this year. Those are floors set by law. An employer cannot roster its way around them, and “that’s our standard rate” is not a defence.

The pattern we see most in Melbourne rarely involves an employer paying nothing at all. It is the flat rate that quietly swallows penalties: $34 an hour for every hour, including the Sunday close and the public holiday open, in a job where the award says those hours are worth $45 or more. Multiply that gap across every weekend for six years and you can see why underpayment claims routinely surprise the people who bring them.

If your roster includes nights, weekends or public holidays and your payslip shows one rate, send us the payslip. Call 1800 130 120 and we will tell you on a free call whether the numbers hold up.

What you can recover, and how long you have

Underpayment claims reach back six years, with interest, and unpaid superannuation (now 12 per cent) is chased separately through the ATO. Every pay cycle you wait, the oldest week of your claim falls off the back. Claims up to $100,000 can run through the courts’ small claims process, which is built to be quicker and cheaper than ordinary litigation, and where several colleagues share the same employer and the same problem, the claims can travel together. Those group files are a regular part of what our employment lawyers do, and almost all of them begin with one person checking a single payslip.

The law behind you has also hardened. Penalty and overtime rates in modern awards are now locked in by law and cannot be traded away or reduced through the award system, and deliberate underpayment is now a federal crime. Employers and their advisers know both changes, which is why a well-drafted letter of demand now settles matters that would have been stonewalled five years ago.

Complaining about pay is a protected act

Plenty of underpaid workers stay silent because they expect the roster to punish them for asking. Asking about your pay is a workplace right under the Fair Work Act. If your hours are cut, your shifts vanish or you are dismissed after raising it, that is adverse action, with uncapped remedies on top of the wages themselves. Adverse action of that kind is dealt with under wrongful termination, and the two claims frequently run together.

Start with one payslip

You do not need spreadsheets or a legal theory to make the first call. A payslip, a rough idea of your usual hours, and the name of your employer is enough for us to check your rate against the correct award classification, which is where most underpayments hide. Working out which award and level actually covers you is its own battleground, which is why modern awards get a page to themselves. Call 1800 130 120 or use the form on this page. The first conversation is free and confidential, and it is often where people find out what they have quietly been owed for years.