Farm Rosters and how they impact Rostered Days Off and Annual Leave.
Let’s just jump on the tractor and head in to town for 5 minutes. What is glaringly obvious is that most townies work 5 days per week and do about 40 hours per week give or take. Not a bad lark really considering most townies are looking out a window somewhere when it’s hosing down or baking hot whilst there you are getting caught in a storm with the “murphy” factor placing you at the back of the farm with no rain coat.
So here we are tapping together words in the comfort of our office and trying to string some sensible, easy to absorb information together for all you farmers out there, both those of you who employ and the employed.
So townies work 5 days a week and do roughly 40 hours of work per week and to top it all off they have 4 weeks holiday which is easy to figure out as a week is 5 days….so 20 days of annual leave. Basically NZ employment laws are written to suit the townies. The 5:2 Roster most of them / us work to, equals an entitlement of 104 RDO’s (commonly referred to in town as weekends).
For those of you working in Dairy on a 5:2 roster “big ups” to you, however the majority of Dairy Farm folks don’t work a 5:2 Roster. There are a multitude of different rosters used across NZ ranging from 5:2 with a RDO entitlement of 104 days right through to 19:2 with a RDO entitlement of 34 days. The most commonly used Rosters are 12:2 and 11:3. So it is pretty easy to see how different Rosters affect the number of RDO’s. How the Roster affects Annual Leave however is slightly trickier to get your head around. Basically any roster other than a 5:2 will have a different entitlement insofar as the number of Annual Leave Days is concerned. A 12:2 = 6 days in a working week = 24 Annual Leave days per season whilst an 11:3 = 5.5 days in a working week = 22 Annual Leave days per season. The table below illustrates a number of rosters commonly used across NZ and the effects of those rosters on RDO’s and Annual Leave entitlements.
Don’t forget: Agrismart software is the only time-sheet, payroll and roster software built entirely for NZ Dairy Farmers.
