Fair Work Commission

The AWRS is the first contemporary survey to collect information on the extent of National Minimum Wage use. Other surveys, including the ABS Employee Earnings and Hours (EEH) Survey (catalogue 6306.0) collect information on award use, but have not identified persons who are covered by the National Minimum Wage Order. The National Minimum Wage applies to people who are not covered by an award or an agreement.

Enterprises that reported setting wages for employees via an individual arrangement were asked whether they set wages for any employees by the National Minimum Wage. At the time of conducting the AWRS, the National Minimum Wage was $16.37 per hour and this information was used to clarify what the National Minimum Wage was and that it applied to employees who were not covered by an award or enterprise agreement.

As presented in Table 5.6, around 1% of enterprises reported using the National Minimum Wage to set wages for their employees.

As the only resource to quantify the prevalence of National Minimum Wage use, the AWRS may be able to illuminate the types of work performed by employees that may not be covered by modern awards and enterprise agreements and identify if there are any opportunities to address any coverage gaps in modern awards; however, it appears that very few enterprises are using the National Minimum Wage to set wages for employees.

Analysis of National Minimum Wage use was also performed for the employee workforce population. Fewer than 1% of all employees were paid the National Minimum Wage.

Source:  AWRS 2014, Employee Relations survey and Enterprise Characteristics (Recruitment screener) survey.

Base = 3044 enterprises. Enterprises that did not know if any employees were paid the National Minimum Wage are excluded.