As a carpenter running your own business, you should consider what to include in your employment contracts. As a carpenter, you will not deal with the same situation twice. Each job requires you to use your experience to come up with solutions to novel problems. Therefore, your employment contracts should be broad enough to cover all situations. However, they must be specific enough that there is no ambiguity as to the roles and duties of your employees. This can be a difficult balance to keep, but it is vital to the success of your carpentry business. Hence, this article will discuss the critical considerations of what to include in your employment contracts as a carpenter.
As an employer, understand your essential employment obligations with this free LegalVision factsheet.
What Type of Employee Should I Hire as a Carpenter?
Before drafting an employment contract, you must consider the type of employee you want to hire. Different types of employees will have different entitlements, and you must ensure you know them.
Casual Employment
Hiring a casual employee may be ideal if you cannot provide employees with guaranteed work hours. A casual employee is employed on an ad-hoc basis, meaning there is no firm advance commitment to ongoing work with an agreed work pattern. While you can provide casuals with work as your business needs, casual employees can refuse work.
Nevertheless, casual employees do not have the same entitlements that a permanent employee may have, such as paid annual or personal leave. However, casual employees are entitled to a 25% casual loading on top of their hourly base rate to compensate for this.
Permanent Employment
Unlike a casual employee, a permanent employee generally works set weekly work hours and has an ongoing relationship with their employer. Therefore, a permanent employee may be classified as a full-time employee, who usually works 38 hours per week or a part-time employee, who works less than 38 hours per week.
Permanent employees are also entitled to notice of termination and other entitlements such as paid leave. However, a part-time employee has the same entitlement to paid leave as a full-time employee, although you calculate this entitlement on a pro-rata basis. Therefore, before hiring a permanent employee, you should carefully consider whether your business is in a position to provide them with a guaranteed number of hours and all of their entitlements.
What Should I Include in My Employment Contracts?
As a carpentry business owner, the glue that binds all the different areas of your business together is your employment contracts. This is the only mechanism with the power to define the employment relationship and ensure the cohesion of all its various parts. Therefore, your employment contracts must be well-drafted and clearly outline the expectations you have of your employees.
An employment contract should, at a minimum, include the following.
1. Type of Employment
An employment contract should clearly state the type of employee you are hiring. Depending on the type of employee you choose, your employment contract will need to include specific terms. For example, a permanent employment contract can reference the employee is entitled to paid leave, such as annual and personal/carers leave.
2. Payment Terms For a Carpenter
Your employment contract must outline how much you will pay your employees. How much your employee is entitled to depends on several factors. All employees are entitled to the national minimum wage. However, an employee is also covered by a modern award or enterprise agreement. In that case, they may be entitled to a higher pay rate or entitlements.
3. Work Health and Safety For a Carpenter
Your employment contract should require your employees to comply with your workplace policies and procedures that address workplace health and safety.
4. Confidential Information
As a carpenter, you have likely worked hard to develop a solid client base. However, you must consider how to protect this information best, especially when an employee leaves your business. Your employment contract must include a robust confidential information clause, which requires your employee to keep information such as client lists confidential during and after employment with you.
Consider whether you would like to include a restraint of trade clause in your employment contract. There are two different types of restraint of trade clauses, including a:
- non-competition clause, which restricts an employee from working with a competitive business once their employment ends with you; and
- non-solicitation clause, which restricts an employee from soliciting or poaching any of your clients or personnel from your business once their employment ends with you.
Can I Write My Employment Contracts as a Carpenter?
The short answer is yes. However, the changing nature of employment law means that, without prior legal experience in this area, writing your employment contracts can open your business up to a vast array of liabilities.
However, this does not necessarily mean a lawyer must write all your employment contracts. Instead, you can write some, if not most, of your employment contracts and then take them to a legal professional to ensure there are no gaps or errors, reducing the risk of liability for your business.
Key Takeaways
As a carpenter starting or expanding your own business, you should consider what to include in your employment contracts. Your employment contracts should be watertight when they need to be. However, they should also allow your employees the freedom to specialise in the areas in which they excel.
If you need help drafting employment contracts for your carpentry business, our experienced employment lawyers can assist as part of our LegalVision membership. For a low monthly fee, you will have unlimited access to lawyers to answer your questions and draft and review your documents. Call us today on 1300 544 755 or visit our membership page.
Frequently Asked Questions
Employment law is an evolving area of law, and your employment contracts must be up-to-date and include robust clauses to provide your business with the protection it needs. Hence, you should work alongside lawyers when drafting your employment contracts.
It is essential that you clearly outline how much you will pay your employee and any entitlements they may have. In addition, you can include clauses around confidential information and restraints of trade to protect your business’ interests, especially if an employee leaves.
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