The agreement decides the rate. Before payroll sees the hour.

A premium is missed because the clause that triggers it lived in a person's memory rather than in the system. A member two places higher on the seniority list finds out that overtime went past them. A guaranteed-hours clause quietly goes unmet in a short week. None of these are payroll errors. They are decisions made hours or days earlier, by someone filling a gap, without the contract in front of them.

By the time payroll runs, the decision is already made and the only remaining option is a correction. Corrections are expensive twice: once in the re-run, and once in what they do to a member's trust in their own pay.

WorkAxle moves the decision earlier. Rules from the agreement run at the moment the assignment is made and again when time is classified, so the premium, the order, and the entitlement are settled while they can still be changed cheaply.

• Seniority and bid rights. Seniority-based assignment codified directly, with seniority date and rotation held as fields the eligible-member lists sort and filter on.
• Premiums and differentials. Shift differentials, holiday premiums, and overtime tiers applied by rule at time classification, tied to the shift, the segment, and the time range.
• Guaranteed hours and overtime distribution. Guaranteed-hours clauses and the rules that govern how overtime is spread across the membership.
• Member identity. Union membership tracked on the member record, so the right agreement governs the right person without a lookup table on someone's desk.
• Rest, consecutive-shift and day-off thresholds. Configured from drag-and-drop rule templates and effective-dated, so a new clause is staged with the date it takes effect.
• Leave and entitlements. Accrual rules, entitlements, statutory holiday grants and blackout periods following each agreement, on the same engine.

The rules are authored by the customer's own operations and labor-relations teams in a no-code builder, not by a vendor sprint. WorkAxle builds the initial ruleset during onboarding, and the customer maintains it from there. The rule engine that holds a collective agreement covers how rules are configured, versioned, and dated.

Most overtime grievances come down to one question: who was called, in what order, and what did they say. That question is usually answered by a supervisor's notepad, which is why it is usually lost.

For an unfilled job, a call list of eligible members can be opened and sorted by fields such as seniority date and rotation. Each call is logged against one of five fixed statuses, with a free-text note and a timestamp, and the assignment is made on acceptance. A member who refuses an offered shift can be required to give a reason, configurable per location and department.

Bidding runs the same way. Peer shift trades and shift donations route through manager approval, open-shift bidding is gated on qualifications, and the approval prompt surfaces the member's hours and overtime impact at the moment of the decision. The cost of an award is visible before it is granted, not in the following pay period.

The engine warns and allows an override. It does not hard-stop, because a supervisor covering a post at nine at night sometimes has to make a call the rules would not make. The rule that was breached is named, and the override is logged with who made it and when. That pairing, the rule plus the reasoned exception, is what stands up in a hearing.

An operation that grew by acquisition rarely has one agreement. It has four, with different premium structures, different seniority rules and different renewal dates, and a payroll team reconciling between them by hand.

Rules are scoped per site, so multiple agreements run side by side in one engine and one deployment. Each site carries its own classifications, and a site under no comparable clause inherits nothing it should not. When an agreement is renegotiated, the change is staged with its effective date and takes effect without touching hours already captured. Where a rate is corrected after the fact, historical periods can be recomputed with full before and after change history, so the restatement is auditable rather than unexplained.

Then the hours leave. Overtime, premiums, and differentials are already applied, so classified hours reach your payroll system as pay-ready rows rather than a file someone rebuilds each cycle. The whole operation this sits inside, from labor law through the payroll handoff, is on the HR, labor relations, and payroll operation page.

A national airport-operations security provider, Canada

Multiple union collective agreements and 8,000+ unionized screening agents, against a fixed contract start date with no soft launch. It went live across major Canadian airports in eight weeks, where the industry norm for a deployment of that complexity is twelve to twenty-four months, and reported 100% ROI within two months of go-live, a 22% reduction in workforce-management administration costs, and 14% fewer error corrections.

A unionized Crown corporation

One of the most complex collective agreement portfolios in our customer base, automated with no scripting.

Contract guarding runs this problem alongside licensing classes and client billing tiers, and security and guarding operations covers that combination. Terminals run it against gang premiums and vessel calls, on port operations.

Figures above are from production deployments. Collective agreement terms, and the labor law that interacts with them, vary by agreement and by jurisdiction. Nothing here is legal advice.