SIX hair and beauty salons in Canberra have paid back a total of $6,263 they owed to 15 employees, after a nationwide audit campaign by the Fair Work Ombudsman.

The same investigation also found 11 of 14 randomly selected local salons were in breach of their legal responsibilities to workers – the lowest compliance rate of any state or territory in the hair and beauty sector, which was selected for scrutiny due to the high number of complaints it has generated.

Fair Work Inspectors found a significant number of employers in the ACT were underpaying staff because they had not applied the July 2012 annual wage increase, while some had underpaid juniors and apprentices as a result of not increasing their wages on the employee’s birthday or when they began the next year of an apprenticeship.

The inspectors randomly selected 858  hair and beauty salons around Australia as part of the campaign and found 474 (55 per cent) were not meeting their obligations under workplace laws.

Just 21 per cent of the 14 salons audited in the ACT were compliant, compared to the highest compliance rate of 58 per cent achieved in Queensland, followed by NT (55 per cent), NSW (48 per cent), SA (41 per cent), Tasmania (40 per cent), WA (36 per cent) and Victoria (25 per cent).

As part of the crackdown, Fair Work Ombudsman Natalie James says Fair Work Inspectors assisted all employers to voluntarily fix their mistakes and put processes in place to ensure they were not repeated.

“While the overall contravention rate was concerning, it is pleasing that all employers were willing to back-pay their staff without the need for further action,” Ms James said. “The campaign aimed to ensure workers were receiving their full entitlements and to make sure employers in the industry were aware of their obligations under workplace laws.”

“We are conscious that the hair and beauty industry employs a significant number of young workers who can be vulnerable if they are not fully aware of their rights or are reluctant to complain, so it is important we are proactive about ensuring they are being paid correctly.”

The office of the Fair Work Ombudsman worked closely with industry bodies as part of the campaign to ensure they had the neccessary information to promote compliance with workplace laws among their members, and also wrote wrote to more than 17,000 hair and beauty businesses nationally to highlight the free, tailored resources at www.fairwork.gov.au/hairandbeauty to make it easy for them to do the right thing.

The resources include templates for time-and-wages sheets and pay slips, the PayCheck Plus tool to help employers calculate the correct pay for staff, an educational webinar and links to information on workplace laws relating to apprentices and trainees.

As part of the campaign, the Fair Work Ombudsman also distributed 60,000 educational postcards aimed at young hair and beauty industry workers through cafes, bars, tertiary institutes and other venues nationally.

Ms James said the Fair Work Ombudsman would continue to focus educational and compliance activities on the hair and beauty industry, including working with key employer organisations to improve business operators’ awareness of workplace laws.