Ling-yi Tsai is a distinguished HRTech expert with a career spanning decades, dedicated to helping organizations navigate the complex intersection of workforce management and digital evolution. Her expertise lies in the nuanced integration of technology into traditional industrial frameworks, making her a sought-after voice on how automation and data tasks reshape legacy job descriptions. Today, she shares her insights on a landmark Fair Work Commission ruling involving a defense manufacturer, where the “informal” expansion of a lab worker’s duties into the realm of database management led to a significant legal and financial reckoning.
The conversation delves into the dangers of allowing roles to evolve without formal documentation, the specific challenges of mapping technical IT skills into rigid manufacturing classification grids, and why relying on higher-duties clauses for permanent role expansions is a risky strategy. We examine the practical implications for employers who fail to track hours or update contracts when an employee begins performing specialized technical work “as needed.”
When a laboratory employee begins performing technical IT tasks like SQL queries and database troubleshooting alongside their original duties, what are the primary risks for an organization that fails to formalize this change?
The situation we saw at Thales is a textbook example of “role creep” where the boundaries of professional responsibility become dangerously blurred. Since August 2020, this employee was essentially operating in two different worlds—the physical laboratory and the digital database—without any clear administrative fence between them. By not providing a separate contract or even keeping records of when he was performing IT work versus lab work, the company lost the ability to define the scope of his employment. This informality creates a vacuum that is usually filled by legal disputes, as the worker rightfully feels the weight of their increased specialized knowledge but lacks the corresponding pay and status. From an industrial relations perspective, doing work “as needed” is a recipe for disaster because, in the eyes of the Commission, if you can’t prove the roles are separate, they become one single, more complex, and more expensive role.
The Commission mentioned that trying to classify this hybrid role was like “fitting a square peg into a round hole” because three different experts came to three different conclusions. How can HR teams avoid this level of confusion when technical and manual roles overlap?
Classifying modern, hybrid roles is often like trying to navigate a ship through a thick fog; the old maps simply don’t show the new terrain. In this case, the frustration was palpable as three experts reached conflicting results, leading the Commission to admit they were essentially comparing apples to oranges. This highlights a systemic failure in many enterprise agreements that were written before data management became a core component of industrial work. To avoid this, HR teams must be proactive in creating bridge classifications that recognize technical competencies like SQL before a dispute arises. When you have an employee who has been performing these tasks for years, the lack of a clear classification grid makes the eventual reclassification process feel like a high-stakes gamble for everyone involved.
Why did the Commission determine that a higher-duties clause was an inappropriate solution for this specific employee’s situation?
Many management teams reach for the higher-duties clause as a “quick fix” for a surge in technical workload, but this case clarifies that such clauses are not a catch-all for permanent change. Higher-duties provisions are fundamentally designed for temporary gaps, such as covering for a manager on leave, rather than for an employee who has acquired new competencies and applies them every day. The worker in this scenario wasn’t just “filling in”; he was fundamentally changing what it meant to do his job on an ongoing basis since late 2020. Because the expansion was permanent and reflected a growth in his personal skill set, the Commission looked past the temporary nature of the clause and insisted on a full reclassification. This resulted in the manufacturer being ordered to backdate pay to the first pay period after December 2, 2021, which is the date the worker first sought a formal review.
What is your forecast for the future of job classifications as technical skills like data analytics become more common in traditionally manual sectors?
I forecast a significant shift toward much more fluid, competency-based classification systems that can adapt to rapid technological shifts without requiring a Commission ruling to settle the score. We are going to see a surge in similar disputes across the manufacturing and defense sectors as traditional roles are increasingly infused with high-tech requirements like systems configuration and data troubleshooting. Organizations will no longer be able to hide behind the “informal arrangement” defense because this ruling emphasizes that the actual work performed is what dictates legal reality, not just the original job title. HR departments will have to become much more vigilant, auditing “as needed” technical work before it becomes a permanent, uncompensated fixture of an employee’s daily routine. If companies don’t start documenting the scope, pay, and hours of these expanded roles at the outset, they will continue to find themselves on the losing end of expensive back-pay orders.