We are aware that Coastal Residential Service have been systematically rostering employees on sleepover shifts for more than 8 hours, which they are not allowed to do under your workplace agreement.
 
We wrote to your CEO Dee-Anne Kapene to explain that the agreement specifies that a sleepover is an 8-hour period (under clause 41(a)) and sets a fixed allowance for that – so you can’t then have sleepover shifts for 8.5 or 9 hours.
 
Any hours that exceed 8 hours on a rostered sleepover should be paid as time worked, not as part of an allowance. However, CRS seem to have paid staff that fixed allowance regardless of the length of their sleepovers.
 
We've told Dee that to rectify this they need to:

• Undertake a full audit of employee wages, highlighting rostered sleepover periods, and provide this to staff and the union.
• Backpay affected current and former staff members for unpaid wages for periods of 30 minutes or one hour, depending on the length of their sleepover shifts.
• Backpay affected staff all applicable penalties and, separately, superannuation payments.

We’ll update you once we hear back from Dee.

On another note, several workers asked whether they’ve been paid the correct penalties when working a night shift. We can confirm that both afternoon shift and night shift attract a penalty of 15%, so even though you worked a nightshift, and your payslip may state afternoon shift, the penalty is still the same.

To be clear, if you’ve been paid a 15% penalty for an afternoon shift, that is correct, and if you’ve been paid a 15% penalty for an awake night shift that is also correct.

If you have more questions about sleepover shifts and penalties, you can contact HACSUassist.