By Greg Allan, tradesman and creator of Data First Coaching
Which award covers a metal fabrication and welding business in Australia?
If you run a fabrication and welding business, your workshop staff who do cutting, folding and welding on structural steel, aluminium and stainless are generally covered by the Manufacturing Award [MA000010]. The Fair Work Ombudsman says this award covers employers in manufacturing and associated industries, and its own metal work definition names metal fabrication, sheet metal work, welding, boiler making, erection and repair, see the Manufacturing Award summary. The Ombudsman's own guidance on entry-level classifications even uses a new starter at a metal fabrication company as its worked example, see Changes to entry-level classifications.
It does not stop there. The same fabricator can have a second award in play the moment a crew leaves the workshop. The Fair Work Ombudsman's Building and Construction Award summary says metal and engineering construction, including fabrication, erection and installation work on site, can fall under that award instead. Aluminium work can also touch a third award, the Aluminium Industry Award 2020 [MA000060], which the Ombudsman describes as applying to processing, melting, casting, rolling, extrusion and fabrication of aluminium as part of other manufacturing operations, see Aluminium Industry Award. In Western Australia, some fabrication businesses sit under a state award instead, the Manufacturing, Maintenance and Metal Trades Award published by the WA Government, see Manufacturing, Maintenance and Metal Trades Award. Which one applies depends on the owner's own structure and the work done, so it is worth checking against the owner's own business rather than guessing.
This is general information, not legal, tax or employment advice. Check your own situation with the body named here or a qualified adviser.
Why does knowing the award name matter less than most fabricators think?
Knowing the award name tells a fabricator nothing about whether the wage cost that award sets is actually landing in the cost of the job. Most fabrication businesses already separate steel, aluminium and stainless material cost onto the job, down to the offcut. Far fewer separate the welder's hours the same way.
The award, whichever one applies, determines a base rate, allowances and what happens on overtime when a site install runs late. That is real cost sitting against a real job. When it is tracked as a general wage expense rather than loaded onto the structural steel order, the gate, or the balustrade run it was actually spent on, the job never carries its true labour cost. The quote can show a healthy margin on paper while the business quietly absorbs the real cost of keeping staff on that job.
What happens when a fabricator quotes without loading the real wage cost onto the job?
The quote looks fine and the bank account disagrees. Powder coat and galvanising lead times push the program out, the site install runs an extra day, and the wages for that extra day get buried in overhead instead of against the job that caused them.
Picture a fabricator running a workshop that had been staffed with two qualified tradespeople on every job, a costly way to crew ordinary cutting, folding and welding work. The owner restructured so a qualified welder now works alongside a second-year apprentice instead of a second qualified tradesperson. The crewing changed, but unless the wage cost of that crew is charged against each job as it happens, the business still cannot tell which jobs actually carried their own labour and which ones were quietly subsidised by the rest of the workshop.
How do you know if your award wage costs are actually loaded into your jobs?
The number that tells the truth is gross profit margin on each job, checked against what it should have recovered, not the markup used to build the quote. Greg's method treats markup and margin as two different things: a rule of thumb on material cost or a labour rate tells you what you charged, not what the job actually recovered as a percentage once every hour, allowance and overtime hit it.
For a growth-phase fabrication business adding a second or third welder, this is the number to watch monthly, not just at quoting time. It is the one that shows whether the crew structure, the award classification and the quoting approach are still lined up, or whether one of them has quietly drifted while the others stayed the same.
How can AI agents help a fabrication business keep wage cost and job costing in line?
An AI agent is software that does a job the way you would do it yourself, using your prices, your wording and your rules, so it can take on the record-keeping a fabricator's own award and job costing depend on. That means pulling hours worked against each job, matching them to the right classification, and flagging a site install that has run long before it quietly erodes the margin.
This works from data first: your own job and pay records, read continuously, rather than a memory of what a similar job usually costs. AI agents are not there to replace the welder or the fabricator's judgement on a quote. They are there to carry the paperwork that currently eats office time without ever showing up on a job card, so the fabricator's own numbers stay current instead of being reconstructed at the end of the quarter.
Where can you check the current rules?
- Manufacturing Award (MA000010) summary, Fair Work Ombudsman's plain-English summary of who the Manufacturing Award covers, including metal fabrication, welding and boiler making.
- Building and Construction Award (MA000020) summary, Fair Work Ombudsman's summary of metal and engineering construction coverage for site work.
- Manufacturing, Maintenance and Metal Trades Award, WA Government's state award for manufacturing, maintenance and metal trades businesses, including fabricators and welders.
- Aluminium Industry Award (MA000060), Fair Work Ombudsman's award text covering aluminium processing, casting and fabrication.
- Changes to entry-level classifications, Fair Work Ombudsman's guidance, using a metal fabrication company new starter as its worked example.
How does Data First Coaching approach this?
Data First Coaching does not start by asking which award a fabrication business thinks it sits under. It starts with the Trade Business Intelligence reading the owner's own job and pay data, to see whether wage cost from the workshop and site install is actually landing against the jobs that caused it, or sitting in overhead where it looks harmless. Greg Allan has seen what happens when that gap is left alone under pressure: “The team will feel it. So they will start to feel burnout.” The how, working through that data and fixing where it starts, is worked through inside the Academy, with members, because the Trade Business Intelligence is powered by every member who is open minded, innovative and willing to share.
