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.
The FWC has speculated that a government business enterprise reviewing a stood-down employee's performance deliberately dragged its feet in the hope he would resign.
Unions are accusing Apple of trying to ram through a deal that could have employees working up to 60 hours a week without overtime, with the ASU and the SDA calling for more time to consult and RAFFWU seeking 5% a year and to claw back alleged underpayments.
An employer has been given a final chance to respond without compulsion to concerns about a recently-approved deal, after a FWC bench dismissed an "unusual" application for it to recuse itself over perceived bias.
The FWC has promised today to provide "real-time" data on bargained pay rises, with plans to issue fortnightly reports on wage movements in enterprise agreement approval applications, with the first "proposed report" showing a 3.2% average annualised rise in the first two weeks of July, well ahead of the last official departmental number for the March quarter of 2.7%.
