Once, employees had no recourse for anything that happened to them in their workplace, whether it was an accident or some kind of unfair treatment from their employers. These days things are different. If something goes wrong that seems impossible to fix, you can quickly consult with employment lawyers and find out what your rights are and what the best way is to go about rectifying your situation.
Simply knowing what your rights are goes a long way towards ensuring you are treated properly, paid the right wage and are given safe and comfortable working conditions. While many Australian employees do know a lot about their rights, some do not for various reasons. Even lack of experience can lead them to suffering injustice unnecessarily.
Then there are people from other countries who work here and may not know what they are entitled to as employees. They don’t fully understand the language, so even if they have an internet connection and know how to do research, reading it does not always explain the answer to their problem in a way they can understand.
This enables unscrupulous employees to make things more to their own advantage and be unfair to their employees, even to the extent of going outside the law in some cases. In other cases it may simply be a matter of carelessness or miscommunication that has caused the problem.
These problems can be simple or complicated and vary widely. For example, they could be about: –
- Unfair dismissal
- Harassment or bullying in the workplace
- Discrimination
- Poor work conditions
- Contracts
- Wages
- Redundancy
- Paid parental leave, or a host of other problems
There are laws governing all these issues and more, so both employees and employers have rights and need to know what the law is on any specific problem. If you are experiencing a problem at work, sometimes the best way to deal with it is to consult legal help right from the start, before it escalates into something worse or more complicated.
Employees spend a great deal of their time and effort in working and no business that employs staff can be run without them. They are a vital component in most businesses, so have the right to fair treatment and to know what the law says on the issues that concern them. It is not necessary to suffer from poor treatment in order to take home a wage you need for survival.
Once people realise this, it will make their lives a great deal easier and happier, no matter who they are or what they do. Of course, the law also protects employers in many ways, since it is there to ensure everyone gets a fair deal.