Communications, Electrical, Electronic, Energy, Information, Postal, Plumbing and Allied Services Union of Australia v Endeavour Energy Network Management Pty Ltd

This case was a dispute about overtime interpretation, not about whether employees had actually worked extra hours. The union said Endeavour Energy had been paying overtime incorrectly under its 2017 and 2021 enterprise agreements. Endeavour said its payroll method was right and had been applied consistently.

The practical disagreement was easy to describe but financially significant. The agreements said that in certain overtime situations the first 2 hours were paid at time and one half and additional hours at double time. Endeavour treated that as a daily threshold. The union argued that, at least for the row dealing with hours in excess of ordinary weekly hours, the threshold should be applied across the week.

The Court gave a simple example. If an employee worked two hours of overtime on each day of a five day week, Endeavour’s method would pay all ten hours at time and one half. The union’s method would pay two hours at time and one half and eight hours at double time. That difference explains why the case mattered.

The union brought the proceeding seeking declarations, compensation for two named employees, Mr Jareth Woolsey and Mr Adam Walton, and pecuniary penalties. The hearing focused only on construction of the agreements. If the union had succeeded on that issue, questions of quantum were to be dealt with later.

The 2021 enterprise agreement set ordinary hours for field staff at 36 hours per week. Ordinary days were Monday to Friday and the ordinary span of hours was 6.00 am to 6.00 pm. The agreement also said the basic rostering arrangement for full-time 35 and 36 hour employees was a nine-day fortnight, with hours averaged over a two week period but paid weekly. The 2017 agreement contained materially identical provisions for present purposes.

The overtime table then divided overtime into different situations. Relevant rows included Monday to Saturday morning, hours in excess of ordinary weekly hours, Saturday afternoon and Sunday, public holidays, pre-arranged overtime on weekends or public holidays, call-outs, continuous overtime before and after the normal day’s work, travelling time and minimum break rules.

That structure mattered. The Court did not read the disputed words in isolation. It looked at how each row in the table worked with the others and whether one interpretation would make another row unnecessary or awkward.

The legal issue was the proper construction of the overtime provisions in the 2017 and 2021 enterprise agreements, especially the rows dealing with Monday to Saturday morning and hours in excess of ordinary weekly hours. The Court had to decide whether the references to the first 2 hours meant the first two overtime hours on each day or occasion of overtime, or the first two overtime hours in the week.

The union argued for weekly aggregation, at least in relation to the row for hours in excess of ordinary weekly hours. Endeavour argued that the table was directed to particular days or occasions of overtime, with a specific rule for continuous overtime before and after the normal day’s work on the same day.

The Court also considered broader interpretive questions. It referred to established principles for construing industrial instruments, including reading the words as a whole and in context, taking a practical and purposive approach, and considering industrial context and history where appropriate. But the visible reasoning shows that the text and structure of the agreements remained the starting point and the main driver of the result.

Kennett J dismissed the originating application. The Court held that Endeavour’s construction was the more natural reading of the overtime table when the agreement was read as a whole. In substance, the Court preferred a daily or particular-occasion approach, subject to the specific continuous overtime provision.

The reasoning turned heavily on how the rows in the overtime table interacted. Rows dealing with Saturday afternoon and Sunday, public holidays, pre-arranged overtime and call-outs were all clearly directed to overtime worked on a particular day or in a particular circumstance. That supported reading the disputed rows in a similar way, although the Court accepted that this was not compelled by the text alone.

A major point was redundancy. The Court said that if the row for hours in excess of ordinary weekly hours were read as requiring aggregation across the week, the row dealing with continuous overtime before and after the normal day’s work would appear redundant. That is because weekly aggregation would already involve adding overtime periods together. The Court also said a weekly aggregation reading tended to deprive the Monday to Saturday morning row of independent work to do.

The nine-day fortnight arrangement also created difficulty for the union’s argument. Because hours were averaged over two weeks, the expression ordinary weekly hours was not as clear as it might seem. One possible reading was that it referred to the ordinary hours rostered for the particular week, but the Court said that was not entirely satisfying because penalty calculations could then depend on rostering choices. Another suggested approach, using a fortnightly calculation, itself showed that the phrase was not straightforward.

The Court therefore concluded that the better reading was that the two hour threshold in the relevant rows had to be crossed on a particular day, not by reference to the week as a whole, before double time applied. At the same time, the Court was careful not to overstate the certainty of that conclusion. It said the text supported the result only with a modest degree of confidence and acknowledged that the intended effect of the row referring to ordinary weekly hours remained somewhat obscure.

The main lesson is not that employers will always win overtime disputes. It is that unclear drafting creates real compliance risk even where a payroll method has been used for a long time. Endeavour succeeded, but the Court still described the text as supporting that result only with modest confidence. That is not a comfortable compliance position for any business.

If your business uses an enterprise agreement, inherited award wording or payroll rules that have simply rolled forward from earlier instruments, this case is a prompt to test the wording against actual roster examples. Ask what happens if an employee works overtime on several weekdays, works before and after a normal shift, works across a nine-day fortnight, or works overtime that overlaps with weekend or public holiday provisions. If the answer is not obvious from the text, the drafting may need attention.

The case also shows why labels can mislead. A phrase like ordinary weekly hours may sound clear in isolation, but once it sits beside averaging clauses, weekend penalties, call-out minimums and continuous overtime rules, its meaning may become much less certain. Courts generally try to read the instrument so that each provision has work to do. If one interpretation makes another row pointless, that can count strongly against it.

For business owners and managers, the commercial consequences of getting this wrong can be substantial. A dispute can involve backpay claims, compensation, penalties, legal costs, bargaining pressure and employee relations issues. Even where the employer ultimately succeeds, the process can still be expensive and distracting.

The judgment records that the parties’ positions emerged through a long chain of emails exchanged between March 2022 and May 2024. The correspondence began with a workplace delegate and Endeavour’s Head of People and Culture, and later expanded to include other officials. The judgment also notes that in August 2023 there was a suggestion that the issue might be resolved in later enterprise bargaining, although the Court said it was not clear whether that led anywhere.

Endeavour also sought to rely on the history of similar overtime wording across awards and enterprise agreements dating back to 1997, and on established practice of calculating overtime on a daily basis. The visible part of the judgment shows the Court discussing the proper role of context and history in construing enterprise agreements. However, because the available reasons do not run to the very end, this page does not go beyond the reasoning that is clearly visible.

For businesses, the practical point is that documents and conduct still matter. Internal guides, payroll practice, bargaining history and correspondence may all become relevant in a dispute, even though they may not displace the text of the agreement itself. Good record-keeping can therefore help explain how a clause has been understood and applied over time.

The judgment was delivered by Kennett J in the Federal Court of Australia on 2 October 2025. The 2021 enterprise agreement had been approved on 19 October 2021 and took effect from 26 October 2021, with a nominal end date of 31 December 2023. The 2017 agreement had been approved on 6 June 2018 and was in operation from 13 June 2018.

The Court ordered that the originating application be dismissed. On the material reviewed, that means the union did not establish the alleged contraventions based on its preferred interpretation of the overtime clauses.

This page is based on the Federal Court judgment in Communications, Electrical, Electronic, Energy, Information, Postal, Plumbing and Allied Services Union of Australia v Endeavour Energy Network Management Pty Ltd [2025] FCA 1202. The visible reasons include the orders, the background to the dispute, the relevant agreement clauses, the parties’ competing constructions and substantial reasoning explaining why the application was dismissed.

The published reasons reviewed for this page do not extend to the very end of the judgment. Because of that, this page should be read as a practical explainer of the decision and not as a substitute for checking the complete reasons where a business needs detailed legal advice or is dealing with a live overtime dispute.