United Voice is today staging a protest outside a Melbourne restaurant at the centre of a bartender's underpayments claim and says its investigation of the state's hospitality sector exposes the city as the "wage theft capital of Australia".
In a ruling that underlines the Fair Work Ombudsman's pursuit of accessorial liability against advisors, a court has for the first time imposed a fine on an accountancy firm involved in an employer's underpayments.
The FWO has initiated its first contempt of court application against a Cairns businessman for allegedly breaching a freezing order by transferring $41,035 out of two company accounts to a family trust when still owing $85,000 to the Commonwealth and former employees.
In one of the first extended discussions about the capacity to include incidental matters in modern awards, the FWC has called for further submissions on how or whether to incorporate a standard clause that would permit employers to deduct up to five weeks pay when employees quit without giving sufficient notice.
After entering into an FWO compliance partnership that commits it to taking responsibility for underpayments across its trolley collection network for the past three years, Woolworths says it would welcome working with any regulatory body to ensure workers in all supply chains are paid correctly.
In the FWO's first underpayment prosecution relying on race discrimination prohibitions in the Fair Work Act, a court has found a Tasmanian hotel and its manager deliberately short-changed a head chef and kitchen hand and expected them to work long hours, six days a week because of their Malaysian nationality and Chinese race.
A Federal Court class action against Chubb Insurance Australia Limited for alleged failing to pay minimum rates, overtime and penalties has been discontinued after the lawyers for the employees failed to secure litigation funding.
A court has found a husband and wife who performed largely home-based clerical work exclusively for one business before their services were further outsourced were employees rather than contractors because the company had an "undoubted authority to control" the relationship.
The SDA and rival Retail and Fast Food Workers Union have within a month of each other filed bids to terminate Domino's Pizza agreements, while the fast food chain says it has been increasing employees' pay via "discretionary entitlements" and expects to soon have a BOOT-compliant enterprise deal.
United Voice has launched Federal Court action against security giant Wilson, accusing it of unlawfully allocating overtime payments to Sundays in a bid to avoid paying correct penalty rates to security guards.
