ALDI has secured a stay on a full Federal Court order overturning the approval of a controversial enterprise agreement covering employees at its new distribution centre in South Australia until its application for special leave to the High Court is determined later in the year.
The FWC has approved an agreement for a franchisee of fast food chain Oporto, after it gave undertakings to lift its base rates of pay by up to a "remarkable" 26%, leaving employees more than 20% better off than under the award.
It would have been preferable for an FWC member to have provided brief reasons for refusing to hear a non-party union's arguments against approval of an enterprise agreement, and she should have acceded to its request for access to the employer's statutory declarations, a full bench has found.
The CFMEU expects to lodge an appeal early next week against yesterday's FWC decision to terminate the agreement for AGL Loy Yang's power station and coal mine because of the "intractable" bargaining dispute between the parties.
The FWC has approved an enterprise agreement despite its "grave reservations" about the appropriateness of the company's ER manager obtaining a list of employees who abstained from the ballot for the deal and questioning them about their vote.
The FWC has chastised an employer for distributing a "partisan" majority support ballot notice that discourages employees from voting to start bargaining.
Australia's two biggest employer groups have joined forces with the ACTU to ask the Turnbull Government to scrap mandatory four-yearly reviews of awards.
An FWC presidential member has approved a bakery franchise agreement with undertakings, while emphasising that the BOOT involves a "balancing exercise" rather than a line-by-line comparison with underlying awards.
The AWU suspects that iron ore mining giant Fortescue Metals Group is set to move its production workforce onto a newly-approved non-union agreement for a related entity.
Private sector enterprise agreements approved in the September quarter paid an average wage rise of 3.4% a year, after construction deals providing substantial annual increases helped to lifted bargained wage deals out of the doldrums, new Department of Employment data reveals.
