Assessment Report: Entitlement of Leaves in a Workplace Analysis

This report examines the entitlement of leaves in a workplace, specifically focusing on Harrington Convenience Store in Sydney, Australia. It explores employee rights, the National Employment Standards (NES), and the Fair Work Act. The report analyzes issues such as low motivation, low job satisfaction, and the lack of various leave types, including annual, sick, and personal care leaves, as per the NES. The study includes interviews with employees, comparing their experiences with leave policies in other workplaces. It also references the Spanish policy on paternal leave and its impact on employee dedication and family size preferences. The conclusion emphasizes the negative impact of non-entitlement of leaves on productivity and employee satisfaction and recommends the implementation of legal instruments for annual and personal care leaves.

Running head: ENTITLEMEMENT OF LEAVES IN A WORKPLACE
Entitlement of leaves in a workplace
Name of the Student:
Name of the University:
Author Note:

1ENTITLEMEMENT OF LEAVES IN A WORKPLACE
Introduction:
Employee relations is a very important concept which involves the efforts on behalf
of the managers of an organisation over their employees in order to make sure that the proper
work place environment is maintained and that the company had a better future (Shields
et.al., 2015). The employees of an organisation have the right to be treated in a fair and
proper manner. The trust between the employees and the managers must be maintained for
the betterment of the organisation. This will ensure loyalty and commitment on the behalf of
the employees which would help the organisation to proliferate and perform well in the
market scenario. According to the employee rights, the employees are entitled to receive
benefits like their ordinary salary and wages in accordance with the health care coverage as
well as opportunities of parental and sick leaves. The National Employment Standards set out
rules which involve the enterprises that the employees deserve. Harrington Convenience
Store in Sydney, Australia is the workplace where the interview has been held and the
feedback has been taken from three employees of the organisation.
Discussion
A. Harrington Convenience Store is an organisation where the employees and the
workers have to face a number of issues. The employees are not allowed to take
leaves. Having discussed about the workplace issues with the employees of the
organisation, I have found out that they suffer from issues of leaves. They have a
serious complaint that the managers of the organisation do not pay heed to what they
have to say and there is a severe communication problem. They feel that they are not
cared and their demand and their problems are not taken care of. The major issue that
they deal with is low motivation and low job satisfaction (Vosko, Noack and Tucker,
2016). After conducting an interview of the three random employees of the

2ENTITLEMEMENT OF LEAVES IN A WORKPLACE
organisation, I have found out that they agree with the other employees and with the
workplace issue that they are facing.
An industrial instrument is a legal application, and it involves the agreements or the
enterprise awards under the Fair Work Art. The National Employment Standards
instrument include that the employees are allowed to have leaves and they are entitled
to take leaves (www.fairwork.gov.au ,2019). The leaves that the employees can have
are parental leaves, annual leaves, leaves for personal care and for domestic purposes,
community service leaves and long service laws and public holidays. The entitlement
of minimum wage pay is applicable to the Harrington Convenience Store. However
the legal instrument of taking leaves is not present in the considered workplace.
B. According to the National Employment Standards and the Fair Work Art (2009), the
entitlements that an employee should have been getting in an organisation is the
amount of leaves that is necessary for a human being (Fodor and Glass, 2018). The
workers and the staffs of the Harrington Convenience Store are allowed to take
parental leaves, which include the maternity leaves for the would be mothers and for
the mothers who have delivered recently. They are also allowed to take special
maternity leave as well as adoption leave. However they are not entitled to enjoy any
kind of annual leaves or long service holidays. The employees are also not allowed to
take unpaid family or personal care leaves, which are enlisted as the entitlements
according to the National Employment Standards (Den Dulk et.al., 2013). The
entitlement is indeed a part of the NES but the organisation does not incorporate such
laws.
In comparison with the workplace of my friend, the employees are entitled to
take and enjoy annual leaves which are paid. Apart from the causal employees of the
organisation, all the employees of the organisation including the part time and the full

3ENTITLEMEMENT OF LEAVES IN A WORKPLACE
time employees get four weeks of annual leaves. They as are allowed to enjoy sick
leaves and personal care leaves. An employee has the right to take leave or time off
from the work for any immediate family member who is sick or during any kind of
family emergency. There is no scope of taking parental leave in this organisation and
the employees are not entitled to take any kind of maternal or paternal leave or an
abortion leave. The employees are however allowed to take community service leaves
and long service leaves after working for a long period of time. They are eligible for
the retirement policies and get paid retirement leave. Most of the employee of the
organisation are entitled to receive long service leaves that are included in the long
service leave laws (Anderson, 2016).
C. While interviewing the three employees of the organisation, I have received the
feedback about their entitlement. One employee have said that they are aware of the
entitlement that they should have received they are not receiving the long service
leaves that they should have received according to the entitlement in the National
Employment Standards. He were not allowed to enjoy the annual leaves which they
deserve. All employees should have been getting annual leaves. The part time
employees of the Harrington Convenience Store do not receive the paid leaves while
having time off from their work. They are not even entitled to enjoy personal care or
domestic violence leaves. The employees are not entitled to take leaves for an
immediate family member or a household member and in case of a family emergency.
The person that I had interviewed had the complaint that they cannot even take sick
leaves and during the personal illness.
The second employee that I had interviewed had provided me with a different
feedback. He is not aware of the fact that they receive no justified leaves. He is not
even aware of the fact that according to the legal instrument and the entitlements

4ENTITLEMEMENT OF LEAVES IN A WORKPLACE
stated in the National Employement Standards, they should enjoy personal care leaves
as well as annual and community service leaves. According to him, if they were
entitled to take leaves, he could have helped his mother in her medical emergency. He
feels that it would have helped the employees of the organisation to remain motivated
and eventually they would have performed better.
The third employee of Harrington Convenience Store does provide me with the
feedback that is almost similar to the others that I have received after interviewing the
other two employees. According to him, if there are leaves sanctioned by the
organisation, to the employees during any sort of emergency and for any proper
reason, it would not have devastating effects on the employees and the number of
employees leaving the organisation would have reduced. The employees also would
have worked diligently which would have resulted in the organisational betterment.
D. According to Purtill and Kopf (2019), in March 2007, the employees in Spain, who
were new fathers were entitled to take paid paternal leaves for two weeks, according
to the Spain’s national policy. The policy had been extremely popular among the male
employees of the Spain and this program had been doubled in the year 2017. Further
in 2018, the leave was extended to five weeks (Leon and Pavolini, 2014). The policy
aimed at improving the relationships of the children with their father and this had
achieved it target. As stated by Romero-Balsas, Muntanyola-Saura and Rogero-
Garcia, (2013), analysing the results of implementation of this policy, it had been
found that the fathers who were entitled to take paternal leaves for the first time were
more dedicated to the work once they returned and they were more attached with their
children. However there was a sharp contrast with the other male employees who
were not entitled to take a leave. According to Rogero-Garcia and Garcia-Sainz
(2016), in a study published in the Journal of Public Economics, economists Lídia

5ENTITLEMEMENT OF LEAVES IN A WORKPLACE
Farré, said that the people and the families who were entitled to enjoy the new policy,
were less likely to have kind sin future. After paternity leave was instituted, surveys
of Spanish men ages 21 to 40 showed they desired fewer children than before. In
accordance with this the women of Spain started having preferences for slightly larger
families and they desired to have more children. This was probably because the policy
of paternal leave entitlements meant more equitable balance of labour at home
(Clavero, 2015).
Harrington Convenience Store has the policy of parental leave entitlements, but only
the maternal leave is sanctioned to the new mothers. The fathers do not get to enjoy
the paternal leave. There was this sheer difference from the employees of Spain since
there was lesser productivity. The employees showed less dedication in the
Harrington Convenience Store than that of Spain.
Conclusion:
Thus from the above discussion it can be concluded that the non-entitlement of leaves
in the organisation of Harrington Convenience Store has resulted in the low productivity as
there is low morale and low employee satisfaction. According to the National Employee
Standards and the Fair Work Act of 2008, the workers should be receiving annual leaves, as
well as personal care leaves and community service leaves in accordance with the parental
leaves. The three employees that I have interviewed have the same complaint of the
entitlement of paid annual leaves in case of emergency. In order to resolve this issue, the
legal instrument of having the sanction of annual leaves should be entitled to the Harrington
Convenience Store.

6ENTITLEMEMENT OF LEAVES IN A WORKPLACE
References:
Anderson, D.L., 2016. Organization development: The process of leading organizational
change. Sage Publications.
Clavero, S., 2015. Gender democracy in Spain: undemocratic compliance and the
domestication of European law. In States of Democracy (pp. 155-169). Routledge.
Den Dulk, L., Groeneveld, S., Ollier-Malaterre, A. and Valcour, M., 2013. National context
in work-life research: A multi-level cross-national analysis of the adoption of workplace
work-life arrangements in Europe. European Management Journal, 31(5), pp.478-494.
Fodor, É. and Glass, C., 2018. Negotiating for entitlement: Accessing parental leave in
Hungarian firms. Gender, Work & Organization, 25(6), pp.687-702.
León, M. and Pavolini, E., 2014. ‘Social Investment’or back to ‘Familism’: The impact of the
economic crisis on Family and Care Policies in Italy and Spain. South European Society and
Politics, 19(3), pp.353-369.
Purtill, C. and Kopf, D. (2019). After men in Spain got paternity leave, they wanted fewer
kids. [online] Quartz at Work. Available at: https://qz.com/work/1614893/after-men-in-spain-
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Rogero-García, J. and García-Sainz, C., 2016. Caregiver leave-taking in Spain: rate,
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Romero‐Balsas, P., Muntanyola‐Saura, D. and Rogero‐García, J., 2013. Decision‐making
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7ENTITLEMEMENT OF LEAVES IN A WORKPLACE
Shields, J., Brown, M., Kaine, S., Dolle-Samuel, C., North-Samardzic, A., McLean, P.,
Johns, R., O'Leary, P., Robinson, J. and Plimmer, G., 2015. Managing employee
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