You’ve probably heard enough about the Personnel Contracting Case and the supposed demise of “Odco” contracting by now …

… to be asking some questions of your own. At least you should have, if you’ve been running or working in an on-hire contractor services model and are now seeking to disentangle yourself from it.

Some of the questions you might be asking could be:

• Must you reclassify your workers? If so, how?
• What are your best guides now that the multi-factor test has been restricted to what’s in the contract, and the courts won’t give much weight to how you’ve described your relationship?
• What might a contract include to preserve the independence of the contractor?
• What penalties might employers now be facing?  After all, the Personnel Contracting Case involved an application for penalties for breach of the Award and the High Court has sent it back to the trial judge to be decided on the basis that the worker was an employee after all?
• What about claims for past entitlements, like leave? Will there be double dipping? Are the “off set” provisions in your contracts any good?
• If you’re left to pick up the bill, can you pass on additional costs to your client?
• What happens to your client contracts, if you’ve agreed to supply on-hire contractor services but your workers are not contractors?
• What are the FWO and Labour Hire Licencing regulators doing about this?
• Should you be stepping away from supplying on-hire contracting services altogether? What other engagement and supply models are viable?
• Could an on-hire engagement and supply model that didn’t promise “compliant” or “controlled” labour really work?
• What does “compliant” or “control” really mean now anyway?
• What about your staff consultants who may be engaged as independent contractors?
• What happens to other provisions in your contracts – like your restraint of trade provisions – if your workers were engaged on the basis that they were independent contractors but now turn out to be your employees? Are those provisions still any good?
• What happens if the contractor is working through their own company?
• What about your contractors whom you’ve put out to be engaged by a payroll provider?
• Where is the line drawn between sham contracting and simply getting it wrong?
• What happens if your contract is NOT wholly in writing? Or if what is written is pretty light on?

Why not bring your questions along to WorkAccord’s Tuesday TalkAbout on 29 March 2022, and engage in the extended discussion via the Labour Hire Licensing & Regulation (Aust. & N.Z.) LinkedIn Group?

You can register for the session via the Eventbrite portal here.

We’d love to hear from you.

Let’s talk!

Andrew C. Wood