5. Additional information
The following section provides information on remuneration outcomes by employment instrument, by sex and by employment category.
5.1 Employment instrument
An APS employee may have their employment terms and conditions set by one of the following primary employment instruments:
- Enterprise Agreements (EA);
- Public Service Act Determinations (s24(1) and (3)) (PSAD);
- Common Law Agreements (CLA); or
- Australian Workplace Agreements (AWA).
An Individual Flexibility Arrangement (IFA) may be used to vary the terms and conditions of an EA. This is subject to the employee being better off overall than they would be if they remained on the terms provided by the EA.
Most employees in the non-SES classifications are employed under an EA. Very small numbers of employees at these levels are covered by PSADs, CLAs or AWAs. There are 52 AWAs remaining in the APS, down from 100 in 2015.
As at 31 December 2016, IFAs were in place for 3,477 APS employees representing 2.5% of the workforce. This is up from 3,167 employees, or 2.3% of the workforce in 2015. At the non-SES classifications, IFAs were used most commonly at the EL 2 level with 1,406 in place, representing 12.4% of the total number of EL 2s. This was down from 1,424, or 12.6% in 2015.
Table 5.1 demonstrates that the most commonly used primary employment instrument at the SES levels was a PSAD.
Table 5.2 shows for the non-SES classifications CLAs provided the highest median Base Salary. However, CLAs are rarely used at the non‑SES classification levels. The EL 2 classification has the highest use of CLAs out of the non-SES classifications, with 0.6% of EL 2 employees covered by a CLA.
At the SES classifications, Table 5.2 shows that the employment instrument that provided the highest median value was AWAs.
5.2 Remuneration data by sex
This section provides information on the key remuneration components based on sex by classification level.
Table 5.3 provides data on the median Base Salary for women, as a proportion of the median Base Salary for men. In 2016, the Base Salary for women, as a proportion of the median Base Salary for men, was 100% or higher at eight classifications. The figures varied from 97.1% at the SES 3 classification to 101.6% at the APS 6 classification.
In 2016, there were no significant differences between the sexes at the median values of each classification level across the three key remuneration components: Base Salary, TRP and TR. Across the 5th to 95th percentiles, the greatest variation was at the SES 3 level, with some deviation towards women at the 5th percentile and towards men at the 95th percentile.
Across the whole population, the average Base Salary for women was $84,104. The average Base Salary for men was $92,036. Across the whole workforce, the average women's Base Salary was 8.6% lower than the average men's Base Salary.
5.3 Employment category
APS employees may be engaged on either an ongoing or non-ongoing basis. Casual employees (non-ongoing and employed for duties that are irregular or intermittent) have been excluded from this report. Table 5.8 provides detail on the Base Salary by employment category and classification.
The classification with the highest proportion of non-ongoing employees is the APS 1 classification, where 26.3% of employees are employed on a non-ongoing basis. The APS 2, APS 3, and SES 3 classifications have non-ongoing employee populations of between 8.3% and 18.3%. All other classifications have fewer than 6.1% of employees employed on a non-ongoing basis.
The number of non-ongoing employees reported at 31 December 2016 was higher than 31 December 2015.
Figure 5.1 shows that, with the exception of the Graduate classification, the median Base Salary for employees engaged on an ongoing basis was consistently higher than non-ongoing employees for non-SES employees. As engagement on a non‑ongoing basis is time limited, there is generally not the same time available for these employees to move through a salary scale. Hence the trend of higher median Base Salaries for non-SES employees engaged on an ongoing basis is expected.
Figure 5.1: Median Base Salary by employment category and classification
Source: Table 5.7