By Greg Allan, tradesman and creator of Data First Coaching
Which award covers demolition staff in Australia?
Most demolition work in Australia falls under the Building and Construction General On-site Award 2020 (MA000020). The Fair Work Ombudsman's own guide to the award explains that the building and construction industry covers work done on-site in a commercial capacity, and that the general building and construction sector specifically includes the dismantling or demolition of buildings and site clearance work, including earth-moving and excavation. You can read exactly how the Fair Work Ombudsman describes that coverage in About the Building and Construction Award.
The award page for MA000020 confirms it covers employers in the building and construction industry whose employees fit the classifications set out in the award, and that it also extends to labour hire businesses whose employees are placed with a demolition contractor or another business in the industry. Whether a particular excavator operator, labourer or asbestos removalist on your crew actually fits one of those classifications comes down to the definitions in Schedule A of the award text itself, held on the Building and Construction General On-site Award 2020 page. If no classification fits, the Fair Work Ombudsman's general guidance on about awards explains when an occupational award might apply instead.
This is general information, not legal, tax or employment advice. Check your own situation with the body named here or a qualified adviser.
Why can a demolition contractor pay the right award rate and still lose margin on the job?
Getting the award classification right and paying it correctly feels like the whole job done. It is not. Knowing the rate on paper is a different thing from knowing what that wage actually costs a specific strip-out, knockdown or asbestos removal once it is sitting inside the business's own records.
Greg's work with trade businesses often finds wages for the people actually doing the work, the excavator operator, the labourer, the asbestos crew, sitting in overhead rather than loaded onto the job they worked on. When that happens, the gross margin a demolition contractor believes they made on a job is inflated, because the real cost of the crew who did the work never lands against that job at all. The award sets the rate. It does not decide where the wage gets booked.
Where does labour cost actually hide on a strip-out or knockdown job?
On a demolition job, the wage is only one part of what the crew actually costs. There is excavator and truck time, tipping and waste disposal fees at the recycling yard, dust suppression and site safety gear, the permit and neighbour notification work the council required before the job could even start, and any salvage that offsets part of the bill.
If none of that gets attributed to the specific job, and instead sits as a general site or overhead cost spread across every job that month, no single quote can be checked against what it actually returned. A demolition contractor pricing a house knockdown or a commercial strip-out off a rate card, award based or otherwise, cannot know the true percentage made until every one of those costs is counted against that one job. Markup on the quote and real margin on the bank statement are not the same number, and the gap between them is almost always what got allocated to overhead instead of the job.
How do you make sure the wage, the machinery time and the tip fees all land on the right job?
You treat gross profit margin as the number to watch every month, on every job type, not just something checked at quoting time. That starts with your own job and pay data, not memory of how the last strip-out felt.
Picture a demolition contractor who had been staffing strip-out jobs with two fully qualified operators on the tools. Once award wages, machinery time and tipping dockets were properly loaded onto each job, the real cost of that pairing showed up clearly against what each job was actually bringing in. He restructured the crew so a qualified operator now works alongside a second-year apprentice instead of a second qualified operator, because the job costing, not a feeling about the work, showed what that combination was costing against what the job returned.
This is what data first coaching means in practice. The decision comes from the business's own numbers, not a guess carried over from the last job.
How can AI agents help a demolition contractor keep award pay and job costing accurate?
An AI agent is software that does a piece of office work the way you would do it yourself, using your own prices, your own wording and your own rules. For a demolition business, that office work is often the paperwork that never quite gets done properly: matching crew hours, machinery time, and tipping dockets to the right job as they come in, instead of trying to reconstruct it from memory weeks later when the invoice is finally raised.
One AI agent could take on matching timesheets and machinery hours to the job they belong to as the week runs, rather than at month end. Another could watch for tipping and recycling dockets, or chase up a permit or neighbour notice step that has stalled, so that admin keeps moving while the crew and the owner are out on site. Running two or more AI agents this way means the people in the business spend their time on the job and the customer, not matching paper.
Where can you check the current rules?
- About the Building and Construction Award - the Fair Work Ombudsman's explanation of which sectors, including demolition and site clearance, the award covers.
- Building and Construction Award MA000020 summary - a summary of who the award covers, including labour hire employees placed with a demolition contractor.
- Building and Construction General On-site Award 2020 (MA000020) - the award's full text and the classification definitions in Schedule A.
- About awards - general guidance on choosing between an industry award and an occupational award.
- List of awards - when an award does not apply, such as where a registered agreement covers the employee instead.
How does Data First Coaching approach this?
Data First Coaching does not start by asking which award a demolition contractor's crew sits under, that is a question with a published answer. It starts by pulling the business's own job and pay data into the Trade Business Intelligence, and asking where the wage, the machinery time and the tipping cost on recent jobs actually landed. Often the award rate was paid correctly and the margin problem still turns out to sit elsewhere, in how labour and site costs were allocated. Greg Allan built this approach from running his own trade business, not from a worksheet. The how of fixing it is worked through inside the Academy, among members who are open minded, innovative and willing to share, because the Trade Business Intelligence is powered by every member who contributes to it.
