KEY POINTS:
IHC workers who sleep over in clients' homes should be paid the minimum wage for an overnight shift and not just a one-off allowance, the Employment Relations Authority has ruled.
The finding in a case taken by IHC community support worker Phillip Dickson is likely to push up costs for the organisation which gets more than 98 per cent of its funding from the Government.
Mr Dickson works in Otaki and Levin for Idea Services, a wholly-owned subsidiary of IHC which provides support for 3300 people nationally, many living in group homes.
IHC developed the group home concept with the "laudable" aim of integrating intellectually disabled people into normal life and society as much as possible, said authority member Greg Wood, who heard the case.
But he found that an allowance of $34 for each sleepover was insufficient, and that the minimum wage should be paid for the duration of the overnight shift.
Community support workers were entitled to claim a minimum one hour's payment if they had to help a client during the night, but they had to justify the claim by logging an incident report.
Only about 4 per cent of workers claimed for work done, and most were reluctant to claim for small amounts of work, Mr Wood said.
Mr Dickson's sleep was uninterrupted on most nights, but the work still restricted his life in that he could not be responsible for his own family's needs when on a sleepover.
He also could not drink alcohol, take sleeping pills, have visitors without permission, and had to sleep on the premises, "which greatly limits other activities of a personal nature that he might want to undertake", Mr Wood found.
- NZPA
