Salaried staff at tech giants like Google and Atlassian could be forced to fill in timesheets after the Fair Work Commission rejected a joint union and employer bid to preserve overtime flexibility for IT professionals.

The ruling comes as most salaried professionals, particularly IT workers, are working from home as part of social distancing measures during the pandemic and are unlikely to be keeping a record of which hours they are working.
AiGroup chief executive Innes Willox said it was “very disappointed” with the commission’s rejection of what were “practical and sensible” changes.
The decision is disappointing, an inhibitor to employment and out of step with where our economy is and where it is headed, he said.
He urged the Morrison government to change the Fair Work Act to give more flexibility over annualised salary rules and adapt the law to a modern workplace.
Given the FWCs very prescriptive and problematic interpretation of this provision, the Australian Government needs to move quickly to introduce amendments to the Act,” he said.
“Awards need to be able to reflect contemporary work practices, including awards that apply to professional employees.”
Quarter of professionals ‘underpaid’
Professionals Australia had drafted the clause to address the award’s lack of overtime penalties following survey results that showed 19 to 28 per cent of low-level professionals were underpaid as result of working an average 45 hours a week.
Under the proposal, employers would have had to compensate all staff for the additional hours through payments at the ordinary hourly rate or through additional leave.
But they would only have had to record staff hours – and reconcile those hours with minimum award rates – for lower-level classifications.
Bundy clocks are now quite sophisticated and even feature fingerprint scanning.  Arsineh Houspian
Employees covered by common law salary arrangements that seek to “buy out” award entitlements would also not be affected.
However, the commission found the clause clashed with the principles that saw it introduce extensive prescriptions to record hours and unpaid breaks of salaried staff, no matter their pay levels, in more than dozen other industry awards in March this year.
In particular, the bench, including vice president Adam Hatcher and commissioner Leigh Johns, said there was no requirement to specify the maximum overtime, weekend or unsociable hours that staff could work under their pay.
The lack of timesheet requirements or pay reconciliation for senior staff meant obligations to compensate their extra hours were “practically unenforceable”.
Meanwhile, an option to reconcile the pay of lower-level employees at the point of termination meant compensation could be delayed for “a large number of years”.
Overall the clause risked unfairness, the bench said, as it “allows the employer to determine unilaterally (and presumably alter unilaterally) the additional compensation which is to be paid regardless of the variability in the number of hours worked from week to week”.
‘No easy task’ to avoid bundy clock
The bench gave the parties until July to suggest changes to meet their concerns or else it said it would propose its own amendments.
Mr Willox said the clause had aimed to “avoid the excessive red-tape burden and ‘bundy clock’ approach inherent in the FWCs problematic annualised salaries decision”.
“The industrial parties have been invited to put forward proposed award variations consistent with various conclusions that the full bench has reached,” he said.
“Given the prescriptive nature of these conclusions, it will not be an easy task to preserve the current flexible and practical approach to hours of work.”
Professionals Australia interim chief executive Gordon Brock said “this is the first time the commission has recognised the problem of professionals not being adequately paid for overtime under the current system”.
“We now need to work toward a solution that will be acceptable to the commission.”