Fair Work Commission

The online survey version of the Workforce Profile questionnaire collected information about the mix of workers directly employed by the enterprise (employees), other paid workers, such as labour hire workers, contractors/sub-contractors, consultants and freelance workers, and unpaid workers, including family members, interns and volunteers.

The AWRS contains estimates of the number of these types of workers during the reference period and whether the enterprise had used the services of these types of workers over the previous 12 months.

Information about working proprietors was also collected, as well as further detail about the enterprises’ employees, such as employment status and hours worked.

The reference period for the workforce profile information is February 2014. As noted in Table 3.4, for 46% of enterprises, demand for goods and services was reportedly seasonal. This means that for some enterprises, the workforce profile reported in February 2014 may not reflect the workforce composition for that enterprise at other times of the year.

As presented in Figure 4.1, just over three-quarters (76%) of enterprises directly employed at least 75% of their workforce.

For the larger enterprises with 200 or more employees, the reported employment size could be a proxy for total workforce size as more than 90% of these enterprises directly employ at least 75% of the workforce, compared to 73% of smaller enterprises (although noting that the number of workers these proportions represent would vary greatly between larger enterprises and smaller enterprises).

Source: AWRS 2014, Workforce Profile survey and Enterprise Characteristics (Recruitment screener) survey.

Base = 1220 enterprises provided responses to the number of direct and non-direct employees.

Note: A ratio was calculated (direct employees/total workforce) to determine proportion of total workforce that is made up of direct employees.

The AWRS collected further information about the status of employment (i.e. permanent/fixed-term contract or casual) and the hours worked (i.e. full-time or part-time) of the employee workforce. A breakdown by gender is also available from the AWRS dataset.

Table 4.1 shows that almost 4 in 5 of the employees were employed on a permanent or fixed-term contract basis.

Source: AWRS 2014, Workforce Profile survey.

Base = 1838 enterprises provided responses to the number of permanent/fixed-term contract and casual employees.

As presented in Table 4.2, almost 70% of the employee workforce of enterprises worked full time.

Source: AWRS 2014, Workforce Profile survey.

Base = 1838 enterprises provided responses to the number of full-time and part-time employees.