A FWC member wrongly concluded that he lacked the power to hear the case of a university employee sacked for refusing to comply with COVID-19 vaccination directions, a full bench has found.
It would be "very surprising" if NSW IR Minister Damien Tudehope received advice indicating that his federal counterpart might have sought to improperly influence the FWC when he wrote to it last week to alert it to agreement termination changes the Government decided at the jobs summit, according to Adelaide University Professor of Law, Andrew Stewart.
Workplace Relations Minister Tony Burke has today written to FWC President Iain Ross to advise of "impending" legislative changes that will prevent employers using terminations as a bargaining tactic.
The FWC has approved the termination of a small business's agreement after a tribunal member took the rare step of inviting workers to attend a teleconference where he spelled out the implications of reverting to the award.
Unions say an "eleventh hour" NSW Government ultimatum to seek to terminate deals covering train workers unless they call off all protected action by tomorrow afternoon is a clear example of the type of action that federal IR Minister Tony Burke will not support.
A prominent IR academic has told today's jobs summit that the optimism that attended the Fair Work Act's introduction in 2009 was "misplaced", with workers in the years since unable to effectively exercise power when bargaining.
An employer has appealed to the Federal Court to quash FWC orders requiring five individuals to appear before a Commission full bench next week to address concerns over their role in the approval of its current agreement.
In a breakthrough for the ACTU ahead of this week's Jobs and Skills Summit, the Council of Small Business has agreed to support multi-employer agreements, while the two will also work together to achieve "new options" for workplace flexibility.
Unions and the Business Council have revived their plan for a more streamlined agreement approval process, with ACTU secretary Sally McManus suggesting the result could be a "really simple" system that might be better than that envisaged when the Hawke-Keating Government devised the bargaining regime in the early 1990s, while IR Minister Tony Burke said today he has shifted from his "hardline" opposition to changing the BOOT.
The AIPA says Qantas pilots have voted up, under threat of outsourcing, a newly-approved agreement variation that permits the flying kangaroo to apply existing fatigue rules for jets that fly six hours to its new generation Airbus A321XLRs that can be in the air for 11 hours.
