How To Run The Season

Introduction

A season is not a plan. It is a few hundred small decisions made before smoko, one day at a time.

You do not need a scheduling system or a tablet for every worker. You need a written week, a way to clock on that survives a wet Monday, and a count made while the bins are still on the trailer.

This chapter is about running the week you will pay for.

The season already runs. The fruit goes out, the work gets done, and everyone knows roughly what happened. The trouble is that roughly is a Friday problem: the counts are on a whiteboard, the hours are in a supervisor’s phone, and the two have to be married up by someone who was not standing in the block when either was made.

That is where the money leaks. A missing punch becomes a guessed start time. A tally with no name on it gets divided by however many people were probably picking. Nobody is being dishonest — the record simply was not made at the moment the work happened, and after that everything is a reconstruction with a signature on it.

Fixing it does not take new machinery. It takes deciding that the record gets made where the work is — at the shed door, in the block, on the trailer — and that nothing is ever written down twice.

A season run on memory fails in three places:

• The morning. Two crews go to the wrong block because the week was decided in the ute at half past five.
• The middle of the week. A picker is under the hourly floor on Tuesday and nobody finds out until the pay run.
• Friday. The hours, the counts and the piece rates are three separate piles that have to be joined up from memory.

Build the Week Before It Starts

The week is decided on Friday afternoon, not Monday morning.

A roster written the night before is a roster written without the weather, without the pack-out figures and without the two people who told you on Wednesday they were finishing up. Give yourself the Friday afternoon. Twenty minutes with last week’s numbers and a forecast settles most of it.

Roster to blocks, not to jobs. “Picking” is not a place. Block 7, mangoes, twelve pickers, six o’clock start is a place, a task, a crew size and a time — and it is the only version a new supervisor can act on without ringing you at five in the morning.

A week that holds up is written as four things:

1. 1The block. Named the way the gate sign names it, so nobody has to translate it in the dark.
2. 2The task. Pick, prune, thin, spray — the task decides the rate, and the rate has to be settled before anyone starts.
3. 3The crew and who runs it. One person per crew, answerable for the punches and the counts that come out of it.
4. 4The start time. A real time, not “first light”. First light moves; a payslip does not.

Then write the second version. Every week needs a wet plan: the block you move to when the orchard is too soft, the shed work that keeps a crew paid when the pick is off. Deciding that on Friday costs ten minutes. Deciding it at ten past six on Tuesday costs a crew an hour and a supervisor their temper.

Keep the week where everyone can see it. The shed wall is fine, so long as the version on the wall is the version you are working from — two rosters is worse than none, because both of them look official.

Then tell the crew on Friday. A backpacker who knows on Friday that Monday starts at six is a backpacker who is there at six. Most of what gets called a rostering problem is a communication problem with a day’s notice attached to it.

Get the Crew on the Clock

A day that is not recorded at its start gets reconstructed at its end.

Clocking on has to happen where the work starts and when the work starts. If the tablet lives in the office and the crew musters at the shed, the record is wrong by ten minutes every morning for the whole season — and ten minutes a day across twelve pickers over eight weeks is eighty hours nobody can account for.

Pick one method per crew and hold it. A tablet left on the shed bench, acting as a kiosk, suits a crew that starts and finishes in the same place. Phones suit a crew that drives straight from the road to a block. Mixing the two inside one crew is how you end up with half a day recorded twice and the other half not at all.

Three things to settle before the first punch:

• Who has no phone. There is always someone. A printed card they scan at the shed solves it, and it does not go flat.
• What happens when it fails. Flat battery, no signal, tablet left in the ute. Agree the fallback on day one — the supervisor writes the time down and it is fixed the same day, not on Friday.
• What the worker has agreed to. Anything captured at a punch, including a location stamp, is something the worker should have been told about and agreed to before their first shift.

Then watch the first three mornings. The punch record will tell you more about your start times than anyone will say out loud: if half the crew clocks on at 6:14, your six o’clock start is a quarter past six, and you can either fix the muster or stop calling it six.

What that looks like day to day:

Count It as It Is Picked

A bin counted at four o’clock is a fact. The same bin counted on Friday is an argument.

Piece work only works if the count is made where the fruit is. Every hour between the pick and the record is an hour for a tally to lose a name, a block or a number — and the worker will remember it differently to the supervisor, because by then both of them are remembering rather than reading.

Before any of that, the record has to exist. A piecework record is put in writing and signed before the work starts, naming the task and the rate that applies to it. Work first and paper afterwards is not a softer version of the rule; it is the exact thing the rule exists to prevent.

Who picked it

A count with nobody against it is a farm total, and a farm total cannot be paid to anyone. Where a bin genuinely comes off two people, split it at the bin, in front of both of them, before the trailer moves.

Which block

The block is what makes the number mean something later. Thirty-four bins tells you nothing. Thirty-four bins off Block 7 tells you the block is nearly finished, the rate is holding, and next week’s roster is one crew lighter than you thought.

What unit

Bins, trays, rows, kilograms — one unit per task, agreed before the season and never changed mid-week. A half-bin written up as a bin because the crew was in a hurry looks like a rounding error and pays like a rate error.

When it was counted

The time attaches the count to the day it belongs to. It bites hardest on the days that run late, when a tally written up after knock-off drifts onto the wrong date and drags that day’s floor check with it.

None of this needs a clipboard for every row. It needs the count entered against a worker and a block as the trailer comes in, by whoever is standing there when it does. That person is usually the supervisor, and it is usually forty seconds.

And record the hours anyway. Piece work does not replace the timesheet — the counts and the hours the worker was there to make them are both required records, and one without the other cannot be checked against anything.

The difference between a tally and a record:

The Daily Guarantee

Piece rates do not remove the hourly floor. They sit on top of it.

Under the Horticulture Award a pieceworker has to finish each day with at least the minimum hourly rate for their classification, for the hours they worked that day. Not each week, and not averaged across the block — each day. Where the piece earnings fall short, the difference is owed as a top-up on that day.

Daily is the part that gets missed. A crew that averages out fine across a fortnight can still contain three days that were short, and averaging them away afterwards is not something the award lets you do.

The rate itself carries a rule of its own. A piece rate is meant to be set so an average competent worker earns at least 15% above the relevant minimum hourly rate. That is a rate-setting duty and it sits with the farm — it is not something you can settle later by paying a top-up every day for eight weeks.

So check it while the week can still be changed. If one picker is short on Tuesday, that is a conversation about rows, ripeness or technique. If eleven of twelve are short on Tuesday, it is not the crew. It is the rate, the block or the fruit, and the honest answer is to change one of the three before Wednesday.

A rate that was right last week can be wrong this week without anybody touching it. The block thins out, the fruit sizes down, the rows get longer at the far end — the picker is working just as hard for fewer bins. That is why the floor check is daily and the rate is a live decision, not a season-long setting.

How that check works in practice:

Two habits keep this alive through a busy week. Read the whole crew rather than the worst picker, because one slow day is normal and a whole crew under the floor is a decision you made. And write down what you changed and when — in November, the reason a rate moved mid-season is worth more than the rate.

Moving People Mid-Day

Half the crew gets moved to another block by ten o’clock. That is a normal Tuesday, not an exception.

The mistake is treating the move as a detail to be tidied up later. It is not. The two halves of that day can carry different tasks, different rates and different blocks, and by five o’clock nobody remembers whether the shift happened at ten or at half past.

When a crew moves, three things move with it:

• The time. Note when the move happened, at the moment it happens. It is one line, and it settles every later argument about that day.
• The block. Work recorded against the block they left is work recorded in the wrong place, and it quietly corrupts the pick rate for both blocks.
• The rate. If the second block pays a different piece rate, the agreement for that task has to exist already. Moving a crew is not the moment to be writing one.

Supervisors will do this well if you ask them for one thing rather than five. “Tell me the time and the block” is a request somebody can honour with a wet hand and a phone in their pocket.

If your farm is two businesses, the rule bites harder. A worker who crosses from one to the other for the afternoon is two records — two employers, two sets of hours — and the split has to be made on the day, because on Friday there is nothing left to make it with.

Breaks, Overtime, Long Days

A twelve-hour day is not twelve hours of the same thing.

Long days are normal in a harvest, and paying one as a single flat block of hours is the most common expensive mistake on a farm. The day has to be recorded in the parts the award pays in, and those parts have to be visible before the pay run rather than after it.

Smoko

Decide whether the morning break is paid or unpaid and where it falls, then keep it the same all season. A break some supervisors record and others do not becomes a ten-minute error that only surfaces when two crews get compared.

The meal break

Longer days carry a meal break, and your award sets when it falls and how long it runs. Record it as taken. “They probably had lunch” is not a record, and a break the timesheet cannot show is a break you may be asked to prove.

Ordinary and overtime

Ordinary hours are the hours inside the span your award sets for that worker; hours past the threshold are overtime, at a higher rate. The split belongs in the timesheet as a split. A single figure of 11.5 hours hides the one thing payroll needs to see.

Casuals

Casuals carry the 25% loading on their base rate, and their overtime begins only past the casual thresholds. A casual working ordinary hours on a Sunday is on ordinary rates. A Sunday penalty is not automatic, and inventing one is as much an error as missing one. Saturday carries no penalty in this award for anybody.

One long day, split the way the award splits it:

Two rules keep this manageable. Decide the day’s shape before it starts, so a twelve-hour day is a decision rather than a drift. And close every shift on the day it happened — a punch left open overnight becomes a shift that ran until something swept it up, which is a correction you have to explain instead of a record you can rely on.

Keep the long days visible while they are still happening. A crew that has been going since half past five is a safety question before it is a payroll one, and the person best placed to notice is the one reading today’s hours, not the one reading Friday’s report.

Wet Days and Breakdowns

It rains at twenty to seven and the pick is off. The day still has to be recorded.

Washed-out days are where records quietly go missing, because not much happened and nobody feels like writing that down. But people were there. Some clocked on, some waited, some were sent home — and every one of those is a fact with a payment attached to it.

A washed-out morning still owes you three answers:

• Who turned up. Recorded even if they worked ten minutes, because a worker who presented for a rostered shift may be owed something for it.
• What they did instead. Shed work, machinery, cleaning up — that is worked time and it belongs on the day against a real task.
• Why the day changed. One line. Rained out 6:40, crew stood down 7:15. In three months that line is the difference between a record and a hole.

Breakdowns work the same way. A picker sitting on a trailer for forty minutes waiting on a hydraulic hose is not on piece work, because there is nothing to pick. Those forty minutes are hours, and hours get recorded as hours.

The wet plan you wrote on Friday is what makes all of this cheap. A crew that already knows where it goes when the orchard is too soft is a crew you are paying to work, rather than paying to stand under a shed and wait for a decision.

Read the Day While It Is Today

By four o’clock you should be able to answer three questions without ringing anybody.

A day you can read while it is still today is a day you can still change.

The three questions, in order:

• Is anyone still on the clock who should not be? A punch that never closed takes five seconds to fix today and a phone call on Friday.
• Do the hours and wages so far look like the day you rostered? If today is a third above the plan, you want that now, not at the pay run.
• Is anything flagged? A missing punch, a count with no worker on it, a piece rate tracking under the floor — all three are cheap today.

A missing punch found on the day costs a minute, because the person who knows the answer is standing in front of you. The same punch found on Friday costs a conversation, a guess and a correction. Found in three months, it costs you a record you cannot defend.

This is also the difference between managing a season and reporting on one. A weekly report tells you what the season did to you. Today’s numbers let you do something back — move two people, change a rate, call the pick early while the fruit is still worth picking.

Give the check a time and a person. Half past three, the supervisor, before the crew scatters. A habit at a fixed hour survives a busy week in a way that “keep an eye on it” never does.

And do not overbuild it. Three numbers on a screen you actually look at beats eleven charts you will next open in July.

Close the Week

Friday afternoon should be a review, not a reconstruction.

If the week was recorded as it happened, closing it takes twenty minutes and consists of hunting four things that go wrong. If it was not, closing it takes three hours and produces numbers that are partly remembered — and remembered numbers are the ones that come back at you.

What a closed week looks like:

Go worker by worker, not day by day. The worker is the unit payroll pays and the unit a question will arrive about, and reading a week across one person shows you the pattern — the picker who is short three days running, the one whose shifts all start at 6:14.

Settle disputes now, while both people still remember. A worker who says they picked thirty-eight bins and not thirty-four has a far better conversation on Friday than in November, and the supervisor who was in the block is still on the farm.

Do it at a fixed time, and do it before people go home. A week closed at four with the supervisor at the table is a different document to a week closed at nine on Sunday night by one person and a spreadsheet.

Then confirm it once. After the week is confirmed, a change should be a change — with a reason attached and the earlier figure still readable — rather than a quiet edit. That is what makes the number you hand to payroll a number you can still explain in seven years, which is how long the Fair Work rules keep time and wage records in play.

Hand It to Payroll

Nothing you have done this week has paid anybody yet.

The farm employs the worker, the farm sets the rate, and the farm pays. Software prepares the numbers and shows its working; your payroll system produces the pay run, and it stays the payroll of record.

What moves is the week: each worker’s hours with ordinary and overtime split out, and their piece earnings beside them. What does not move is responsibility for whether those numbers are right. Somebody at the farm reads them and confirms them, every pay run, without exception.

Watch the boundary of the pay week. Payroll systems work in whole weeks, and a report covering Monday to Wednesday is not a pay week — it is three days that will quietly become one if nobody checks. Read the dates before you send anything, every single time.

Keep the two systems in their lanes. One is where the week is recorded and checked; the other is where it becomes a payment. Trying to make either do the other’s job is how a farm ends up entering the same week twice and trusting neither copy.

What the handoff actually moves:

What comes next:

The week is closed and the numbers have gone to payroll. What outlives the season is the record underneath them — and Chapter IV is about keeping it: which records the Award and Fair Work ask a farm to hold, how long to hold them, and how to have them ready in the shape someone asks for.