The High Court has this morning refused a CFMEU bid for special leave to challenge a full Federal Court majority ruling that increased penalties twelve-fold after after accepting that it could not treat a "lawful request" or a party's motivation for taking coercive industrial action as a mitigating factor when determining fines.
A HR manager should not have allowed a company manager to be put forward as a support person for a worker who was under threat of dismissal, the FWC has found.
The IEU has flagged rolling stopworks in more than 500 NSW and ACT schools next term after the FWC held that, just as the Roman Catholic Church's dioceses are in "full communion" they are also engaged in a "common enterprise", so its employees are eligible to take protected action.
The Federal Court has imposed record fines totalling more than $2.4 million against the CFMEU national and NSW branches and nine officials over breaches at Barangaroo in 2014, but says that without "legislative action" even higher penalties currently available under the law might not deter the militant union.
In the first test of whether Queensland's laws regulating peaceful assemblies can be used to block pickets and protests during industrial disputes, the state's Supreme Court has rejected mining company Glencore's argument that such activities can't be authorised.
The FWC looks set to reduce by a week its hearings into an application by Coles nightfill worker Penny Vickers to terminate the 2011 agreement, after warning that granting further extensions could render her case moot if the retailer gets a new agreement approved.
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 FWC has accepted that BHP Billiton's sacking of a worker who raised his safety visor to get a better look at an exploding smelter at a uranium mine was justified but harsh, stopping short of reinstatement, though, because of the company's "rational" loss of trust and confidence in him.
An FWC full bench has quashed a ruling that upheld Woolworths' sacking of a petrol station employee for failing to follow its armed hold-up protocol when he refused to hand over money and cigarettes to an unarmed but "difficult" customer.
Employer's text didn't dismiss employee; Correct ABN speeds application amendment; Bench clears way for challenge to authority on fixed-term contracts.
