The gap between hours paid and hours worked came back to bite
A casual port worker who was paid for more hours than he actually worked has lost a long service leave dispute after the Federal Court found that "hours worked" means exactly that.
The Full Court on September 25, 2026 allowed an appeal by Flinders Ports Pty Ltd, overturning a South Australian Employment Court decision that had ordered the company to pay $544 in compensation for what the lower court found was an underpayment of long service leave.
The worker had been employed as a casual marine services employee at the Port of Thevenard, near Ceduna in South Australia, since March 2010. His job was straightforward but unpredictable: he sat on a rotation roster of about 19 casuals, called out by phone or text to help moor or unmoor ships. Around 120 vessels berthed at the port each year, generating roughly 240 jobs split among the crew.
Each call-out came with a guaranteed minimum payment under the enterprise agreement. If a job took 45 minutes but the minimum was three hours, the worker got paid for three and could leave. If it ran longer, he stayed and got paid for the extra time. Flinders Ports tracked both figures separately: actual time worked, and the minimum payment hours.
That gap sat at the heart of the dispute.
Under the South Australian Long Service Leave Act, a casual worker's leave entitlement is calculated by averaging the "number of hours worked per week" over the preceding three years, then...
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