The FWC has issued a single interest employer authorisation for two regional Victorian councils, in the first full bench ruling to weigh whether it is barred from approving multi-employer negotiations when a union and an employer party have allegedly agreed in writing to bargain for a proposed single-enterprise agreement.
A leading IR barrister says few employers are equipped to deal with the "huge sleeper issue" posed by the rise of working from home, as it becomes increasingly difficult to order employees to return, but he does not believe more legislation is the answer.
The SDA has won same-job, same-pay orders that will lift pay by $8 to $12 an hour for close to 200 labour hire workers placed at a Queensland Kmart warehouse, while it has also, in league with the UWU, secured similar orders that will raise wages for on-hire workers at Metcash by up to $12,600 a year.
Some 350 maintenance and sustainment workers at the Australian Submarine Corporation's Adelaide headquarters have succeeded in their year-long campaign for pay parity with their Western Australian colleagues, winning an upfront average increase of 18.5%.
A FWC full bench has quashed the approval of a company's CEPU-lodged agreement, found to have been voted up by two workers before it was used to cover AMWU members in a process "entirely lacking in authenticity and moral authority".
The FWC has declined to interfere with the ATO's decision to refuse a worker absent more than 248 days in a year access to unpaid personal leave, observing that its enterprise agreement did not provide an "unfettered" right to such time off.
With "limited take-up" of multi-employer bargaining since its inception last year, a paper presented at the Australian Labour Law Association national conference in Geelong last week says some "technical" amendments would make it simpler and easier to authorise negotiations and make deals.
The public outcry about multi-employer bargaining during the passage of the Secure Jobs legislation was "massively overstated" in the light of the limited number of cases that have since emerged, but recent reforms might have revived single-enterprise bargaining, according to FWC President Adam Hatcher.
Lawyers involved in "wage theft" class actions on behalf of thousands of junior doctors says Victorian public health services might face tens of millions of dollars in fines after a court found one of them "expressly and brazenly" instructed trainees to perform unpaid overtime.
The ETU's hard-fought campaigns for new deals with two NSW electricity suppliers have moved closer to FWC-arbitrated resolutions after the union and Endeavour Energy received a fortnight to hammer out their differences and state secretary Allen Hicks expressed hope that a Commission full bench would make an intractable bargaining determination for Transgrid "by early next year".
