ADF Reserve Duty

[dartman2]

A couple of questions for anybody in the Reserve that works for an Australian airline in any capacity:

1. How much time can/do you get off per year for Reserve activities?
2. Does your civilian employer pay you when you are on Reserve duty (this may be base pay, fleet average, or nothing)? The rules seem to be a bit different between the public and private sectors.

[Roller Merlin]

1. I simply do reserve days on some of my rostered off days each month. However one can also use a minimum of two weeks of legislated Reserve Leave. This is leave where an employer is obliged to release you from normal employment for reserve duties.

2. If you are on Reserve Leave, the legislation is such that if your reserve pay is lower than from the employer, then the employer is meant to pay the difference. However I don't know anyone who uses this clause. Alternatively the member can be on paid or unpaid leave.

Most of the info is on Defence Reserves
The Defence Reserve Service (Protection) Act 2001 protects reservists from discrimination due to their service. ComLaw - Homepage

[rmcdonal]

There is even a payment for your employer "Employer Support Payment ".

ESP is paid at a weekly rate (currently $1183.10 per week) regardless of the employee's salary

[Trojan1981]

It varies from one employer to another. I currently get 22 days per year paid by both my main employer and the ADF. Beyond that I am only paid by the ADF. I am in a postition were I can push for more leave (without pay) to attend ADF training/exercises and there is legislation to ensure that ADF reserve members are released by their employers for operations if required.

I work for a large organisation and it makes little difference whether I am there or not. If however, I thought it might adversely affect my employer for me to be away with defence I would just use my leave days for ADF training.

[YPJT]

Employer Support Payment

If you are self employed (working as a contractor) and have the tax returns to back up your claim, then the ESP will be paid to your business.

[Like This - Do That]

Regarding 'protections' .... be awfully careful regarding what is considered 'protected' service. The Defence Reserve Service (Protection) Act 2001 defines 3 categories of service:

• continuous service following callout by the GG (see the Defence Act 1903 sect 50D, 51A, 51AA etc) - which has never happened;
• voluntary defence service, eg CFTS as cadre staff at an ARes unit or as ADC to a state governor; and
• service rendered during normal training activities, eg Tuesday nights, weekends, annual exercises, courses.

The Defence Reserve Support folks consider 4 categories of service: compulsory call out (as above); voluntary CFTS which is protected; voluntary CFTS which isn't protected; and ordinary service undertaken as reserve training days.

Curiously, the Act makes no mention of 'ordinary service' and its protection status is not specified. In practice it seems that service undertaken as specified in a unit's parade card or annual training plan is considered 'protected'.

Under the Act, employment protection, partnership protection, and education protection are dealt with in Parts 5, 6 & 7 respectively. These protections do not apply for voluntary undertaking unless “a service chief requested the member to give the undertaking on the basis that those Parts would apply to the service”.

So you can see it's not cut and dried. For students it's even murkier, and fewer protections exist.