[scriptman]

When annual salaries get reported in this context, you have to watch for the pea and the thimble trick where they take the base hourly rate and multiply that by standard hours to arrive at the annual salary, but nobody actually gets paid this amount.

This is because the base rate leaves out all of the various loadings that are applied under different circumstances. There are so many circumstances for loadings that the base rate becomes meaningless.

Overtime is only one way to get paid more than the base rate. Also, overtime becomes a meaningless word when you can get overtime just for working slightly non-standard hours, as opposed to working extra hours.

The agreements are written in a way that makes it really hard to calculate what a worker is actually likely to get paid annually. The only way to be certain is to look at the worker's group certificate for tax purposes.

So, while what Senator Carr said was probably technically correct, it was also meaningless since I would suggest that no worker was actually paid that amount in a year. It would be more meaningful to ask what the average amount on a worker's group certificate was.

[jackvalentine]

I think my point is the same as yours - that you can't take figures reported on face value.

> It would be more meaningful to ask what the average amount on a worker's group certificate was.

I think a better figure yet would be the average amount per FTE.

[scriptman]

You are right that per FTE is probably a better measure technically, but this just leaves the unions a loophole: they can just classify workers as something other than FTE. They are very clever at finding these sorts of loopholes and exceptions.

What they can't do though is lie to the tax office. That crosses a threshold from being misleading to being illegal.

There is a big incentive for unions to be misleading about what their members are paid. It's hard to garner a lot of sympathy from the public when the average member of the public is paid a lot less than the average union member. That's not to say that this is always the case - the wages, agreements and marketing to the public by the unions varies significantly between unionised industries.

[jackvalentine]

> but this just leaves the unions a loophole

I'm not interested in talking about unions like you are. Merely getting an accurate read on how much an employee earned.

What you're proposing is eliminating the value of people's time from the equation. Working extra hours or unsociable hours should be paid more because they represent the employee trading away their spare time for more money, and as spare time approaches zero the amount they require at the margin should also increase.

I don't think standardizing all hours across all employees is fair in that regard.

[scriptman]

I'm not advocating what you are suggesting. I agree that workers should be paid extra for working additional hours.

I also agree with you that it's important to get an accurate read on how much an employee earned. My point is that there are some people that have an incentive to obfuscate this amount and that I can only see one unambiguous way to avoid this obfuscation.

I think the starting point in these discussions should be what someone was actually paid, not what they might have been paid. Then if that amount can be justified by unsociable hours, extra hours, or whatever, then that's fine. But if the various hours, loadings or whatever seem unreasonable then that's a different discussion.

I wouldn't even normally be interested in what someone's paid - it's not my business. However, the car manufacturing industry is a different case since there was an expectation that tax payer's money should be used to bail it out. In my opinion, tax payers deserve to know what it is that they are paying for, in detail. Particularly in the car industries case since it seemed like every time that the government tipped in more money that it was closely followed by the workers getting a pay rise.

[jackvalentine]

> I'm not advocating what you are suggesting. I agree that workers should be paid extra for working additional hours.

Ah I'm sorry if I was unclear with that one. I'm not suggesting that you think people should all be paid standard regular rates irrespective of time. I meant that if you use a lump sum "average per employee pay slip" number you're not taking in to account those details.

With full-time equivalent, if George works 60 hours for example he counts as 1.5FTE. After-hours work is harder to quantify, but usually employment agreements similarly put extra value on those hours that can be translated back to FTE.

This seems the sanest and most accurate way to figure it out. The number actual people earn per week is a misleading figure.

I think you might agree with me here, because you said "Then if that amount can be justified by unsociable hours, extra hours, or whatever, then that's fine" and FTE is exactly the way to do that!

I just came across this four corners episode from 2016 which has the quote

"According to Holden management 90% of the workers earn between 43k and 55k per year" (https://youtu.be/CIRuU8qot3s?t=33m08s)

Straight from the horses mouth, as it were. Though of course .5FTE @ $43k is $86k FTE (for example) so we're back at the problem of standardization...

[scriptman]

I see what you mean and that's a good and interesting idea.

However, I think while it would be revealing in some areas, it would mask other problems.

For instance, if you look purely at the FTE, you wouldn't see that George had worked 60 hours. That's a problem. Why did George work 60 hours? Was he really productive for all of that time or is he gaming the overtime system by deliberately doing less work within normal hours so that he has to do overtime to complete his scheduled work.