The Western Australian TAFE Lecturers’ General Agreement 2019 has several clauses around hours of work. To ensure members fully understand the application of the agreement, this month’s article will be explaining Part 5 - Hours of Work.

There are two main clauses that cover lecturers’ hours of work, Clause 35 - Hours and Clause 36 - Averaging. The union has come across cases whereby these two clauses get confused. To assist members in understanding the two main clauses around hours of work we will explain them separately.

Clause 35 – Hours

Clause 35 prescribes the usual or standard way of working hours and is the default arrangement for the agreement. So, unless you agree to work under another clause of the agreement, formally and in writing, your working hours will be formulated under Clause 35 which says:

Clause 35.1: Subject to Clause 36 – Averaging of this Agreement, the full-time ordinary hours of duty will be 37.5 hours per week to be worked between 7.30 am and 8:00 pm Monday to Friday.

This means that the working hours are kept within the week and you do not carry hours over into another week or owe hours.

If you are not timetabled for your full teaching hours (TH) for your fraction on any week, you are required to carry out additional professional activities (PA) up to the total work hours for your fraction and your activities relating to delivery (ARD) will be reduced.

However, you may be asked to provide relief to bring your teaching hours up to 21 TH. If you teach more than 21 hours in any week you are entitled to overtime (OT).

For example, if your timetable has you teaching 20 hours for the term, however in Weeks 7 and 8, a lecturer takes personal leave and you are asked to take their two-hour classes, table 1 shows the hours of work.

Clause 36 - Averaging

Many lecturers work under an averaging arrangement where teaching hours may vary from week to week, but ARD and PA do not, and remain consistent as prescribed in Schedule L – Hours Chart.

For example, if a full-time lecturer averages their teaching hours over a 20-week semester the hours of work would be as per table 2.

Note that the ARD and PA are consistent for every week of the averaging period.

Averaging is a formal process and you must have a copy of the expected teaching timetable, covering the entire averaging period, before you agree to an averaging arrangement.

Some of our trades lecturers may have no teaching hours during the block release periods scheduled for apprentices. This means they are only on site for 4.5 hours PA and 4.5 hours of on-campus ARD. They are still entitled to do 7.5 hours of ARD off-campus.

Work hours for the semester would be as seen in table 3.

As you can see the weeks where the teaching is performed the lecturer is working many hours so the weeks where teaching is not scheduled, the lecturer is only on campus for a total of nine hours of on-site ARD and PA.

As the lecturer is teaching 420 hours in the semester, they would not be eligible for overtime. Any additional teaching would be overtime.

Table 1: Hours of work example – Lecturer with 20 teaching hours timetabled, undertaking relief in Weeks 7 and 8.

*Note that the hour of overtime may attract an additional 34 minutes of ARD time, all paid at overtime rates, if you are responsible for the ARD duties associated with that class.

Table 2: Averaging example one – Full-time lecturer averaging teaching hours over a 20-week semester.

Table 3: Averaging example two – Trades lecturer with no teaching hours during block release periods for apprentices.

TAFE rights and entitlements

Your rights and entitlements as a TAFE member can be found in the TAFE red book at sstuwa.org.au/TAFEredbook

For further queries, speak with your
union rep or delegate.

Member Assist is also available:
memberassist@sstuwa.org.au
(08) 9210 6060