AEU Industrial Update #10 – September 2024 

Right to disconnect

You might have seen in the news this year that the Fair Work Act has been amended to include a new ‘right to disconnect’.

The AEU and other unions had already won a similar right in ACTPS Enterprise Agreements, but members will know that this is notoriously difficult to enforce. The new provisions in the Fair Work Act strengthen our protections when disconnecting from work and give some helpful guidance regarding what’s reasonable.

The right to disconnect means that you have a right to not monitor, read or respond to contact from your workplace after work hours. This includes contact from parents, students, colleagues, or managers, and can take the form of emails, phone calls, text messages or other online communication platforms like Seesaw or Google Classroom.

There are caveats regarding reasonableness that can limit the right to disconnect, depending on context. In deciding whether attempted contact from the workplace outside of work hours is reasonable, we must look factors like the following:

• The reason for the contact or attempted contact,
• The method of contact and level of disruption it causes,
• The extent to which an employee is compensated,
• The nature of the employee’s role and level of responsibility, or
• The employee’s personal circumstances, including family or caring responsibilities.
  
  

What this means in practice is that the contact might be reasonable if it’s a situation like the following:

• You’re contacted regarding an emergency or for an urgent reason (e.g., there has been a plumbing issue which means that the school will be closed tomorrow); or
• You’re contacted just outside of regular working hours (e.g., your manager tries to contact you at 5pm on a Tuesday versus 8pm on a Saturday, the latter would likely be unreasonable); or
• You hold a managerial position for which you receive more compensation (e.g., you’re a principal or College Director) and there’s a serious reason for the contact (e.g., a student is injured at a school camp).
  
  

In situations like these, it’s more likely that the out-of-hours contact would be reasonable, and that you can’t decline to read or respond to the communication.

We can only access this right if we respect each other’s time away from work. To do this, we recommend:

• If you’re about to text a colleague about something work-related and not urgent, consider whether it can wait until tomorrow,
• If you need to email outside of work hours, schedule the email to be delivered during work hours using schedule send,
• Remove Outlook, Teams, and other work-related platforms from your personal devices or, at the very least, disable notifications outside of work hours.
  
  

If you experience an issue with out-of-hours contact, we strongly recommend raising the issue with the person to begin with. If this does not resolve the issue, you should speak with your supervisor or another manager. There are formal mechanisms available under the Enterprise Agreement and Fair Work Act to take action, but these are the last resort.

Given most AEU members are affected by unreasonable workloads, it’s in our collective interest to work together constructively to ensure we can all disconnect from work.

Health and Wellbeing Allowance

As the weather warms up, you might be thinking of a purchase that helps you get outside and active. Remember that you have access to a Health and Wellbeing Allowance of $100 per year. This is claimed as a reimbursement of eligible goods and services related to your health. You can claim it once a year commencing 1 April.

If you haven’t made a claim since 1 April 2024, you can make a claim this year. The deadline for making your reimbursement claim is 7 March 2025. This is the latest date for your supervisor to approve your claim.  Making your claim before the end of the 2024 school year ensures you get your reimbursement for this year.

The AEU has published a fact sheet on this allowance that helps you understand what kinds of items are eligible for reimbursement

Workplace incident reporting upgrades

On 1 July the ACT Government launched a new system for reporting work health and safety hazards and incidents. The new system is called Safety Portal. It replaces RiskMan.

We have prepared a fact sheet on the changes to help guide your use of Safety Portal. Further information for those working in the EDU can be found here. The ACTPS has also published a service-wide user guide for Safety Portal.

Safety Portal provides some crucial improvements. For our members in the EDU, one of these is the connectivity between Safety Portal and SAS. This allows a user to complete a report on SAS and indicate that an injury was sustained. This triggers an automated process, where a pre-populated Safety Report is emailed to you with some details already entered, including the school, staff details, manager and incident summary.

This should reduce some reporting burden – no one likes to write up the same incident twice. That said, however, we have been informed that there can be a delay between the SAS report being completed and the email from Safety Report being received. If this happens, you can still create a fresh Safety Portal report in the same way you’re used to.

We understand an EDU specific user guide for the Safety Portal is currently being finalised. This will provide further details on the connectivity between SAS and the Safety Portal.

Did you know... if you take leave immediately before and after stand down, the stand down period is deducted from your leave, too

If you are on paid or unpaid leave immediately before and after the stand down period, the stand down period is taken as that leave type. This applies for any type of leave.

Let’s say you’re taking long service leave for terms 1 and 2. If you’re on leave for the last day of term one, and the first day of term 2, then the stand down period between terms 1 and 2 will be deducted from your long service leave balance.

If in this example you worked for the last day or term 1 or the first day of term 2, the period of stand down would be paid at the normal rate and not deducted from your leave balance.

School Assistant entitlements to overtime and time off in lieu (TOIL)

School assistants who are required to work beyond their ordinary hours of work are entitled to either receive time off in lieu (TOIL) or payment of overtime. TOIL is essentially time you can take away from work – for example, you work an extra few hours on Tuesday and take that amount of time off work later in the week. Overtime payments are paid at 1.5x or 2x your usual hourly rate, depending on how much you do.

For example, if you are an LSA and usually work ‘full-time’ hours of 31 hours and 15 minutes per week and you work 35 hours over the course of a week, you would be entitled to receive 3 hours and 45 minutes of either TOIL or overtime payments.

There could be a variety of reasons you are required to work beyond your ordinary hours of work. You might be required to attend a staff meeting outside of your paid hours, assist with an after-school event, or attend an excursion or school camp which sees you work beyond your usual hours.

If you know about these kinds of commitments in advance, you should email your supervisor to confirm whether you will be paid overtime or have access to TOIL. Doing this ensures that everyone is aware as to what is happening, and no one is caught by surprise.

If you’re not able to access TOIL or overtime payment, you can decline the additional unpaid work.

If you happen to work beyond your usual hours and it’s not pre-planned, you should email your supervisor afterwards to request TOIL or overtime. If this is denied, contact the AEU office and we can help you out.