Payments to Part Timers on Long Service Leave (Local Government)

QUESTION: We currently have an employee who has a contract minimum of two days at the shire at 7.6 hours per day. His hours fluctuate every fortnight as he also is contracted to 3 other Shires. If he wants to take Long Service Leave will he be paid at his standard contract hours, or a medium of his current working hours?

ANSWER: Part time employees are paid for periods of long service leave at their average weekly earnings for the twelve months immediately preceding their long service leave. That is to say that you add up their earnings for the twelve months prior to the leave commencement date and divide it by the number of weeks over which they earned that money and pay them that much for each week that they are on long service leave.

WHAT DO THE REGS SAY: See sub regulation 8(1a) of the Local Government (Long Service Leave) Regulations that reads as follows:

“(1a) For the purposes of sub regulation (1), the ordinary time rate applicable to a casual or part-time worker in a week for which a payment is made shall be deemed to be the rate that he would have been paid in that week if, in that week, he had worked for the number of hours that he worked on the average in a week during the period of 12 months immediately preceding the commencement or deemed commencement of his leave.” {My emphasis}

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