Hire Me! Labour Hire Licence Changes

The Labour Hire Licensing Regulation 2018 (Qld) (“the Regulations”) was released on Friday, 6 April 2018 to support the recently implemented Labour Hire Licensing Act 2017 (Qld) (“the Act”).

Summary of the Act

A new licencing system has been introduced for labour hire provides throughout Queensland. The Act provides:-

• Any person providing ‘labour hire services’ in Queensland without a licence to do so will commit an offence;
• ‘Labour hire services’ is broadly defined to mean supplying a worker to another person to do work;
• Licences must be renewed annually, and applicants must pass a ‘fit and proper persons’ test before a licence will be issued.

Regulations

The Regulations have been introduced to provide further guidance as to how the labour hire licencing scheme will operate, and how the Act should be interpreted. Section 4 of the Regulations essentially limits the scope of the licencing requirements by providing a list of individuals who are not considered to be “workers”. Therefore, any person supplying these types of individuals to another is not providing labour hire services and consequently, does not need to obtain a licence. The relevant classes of excluded workers are:-

• An employee whose annual wages are equal to or more than $142,000.00 per annum (categorised as high-income under the Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth)) and who is not covered by either a state/modern award or enterprise agreement;
• An executive officer (where the provider is a corporation) who is also the only employee supplied by the provider to perform work.
• An in-house employee* of a provider who is supplied to another person on a temporary basis on one or more occasions.

An individual is provided to another person if the provider and the other person are each part of an entity (or group of entities) which carries on a business collectively as one recognisable business. For example, a business operating a group of medical centres will employ workers through a trust entity and will then supply those workers to the various medical centres to perform work.

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Licence Fees

The Regulations have confirmed the applicable licence fees relating to labour hire under the Act. These fees will be determined according to the wages paid by the business in the financial year prior to the application. New businesses will be charged licence fees on the basis of their protected wages for the upcoming financial year.

The Regulations have split businesses and the corresponding licence fees into three tiers, as follows:

• Tier 1 Businesses (pay wages of less than $1.5 million): $1,000 licence fee
• Tier 2 Businesses (pay wages more than $1.5 million but less than $5 million): $3,000 licence fee
• Tier 3 Businesses (pay wages more than $5 million): $5,000 licence fee

Article Source: https://thelawapp.com.au/press/hire-me-labour-hire-licence-changes/