The FWC has agreed with three WA universities that an NTEU notice misled members and undermined collective bargaining, but it has decided against issuing good faith bargaining orders because the union "set the record straight" despite refusing to retract its statement or admit error.
The Federal Court has issued an interim injunction that restricts the CFMEU to convening no more than one union meeting a week for building workers engaged by subcontractors on a Commonwealth Games construction project on Queensland's Gold Coast.
A court has levied a fine of more than $270,000 on a company that made an employee work 180 unpaid hours as an intern, and has also imposed a $8160 fine and three-year injunction on its director, who was already bound by an enforceable undertaking.
The FWC has backed aluminium giant Alcoa's right under its new uniform policy to bar two employees at its WA alumina mines who are also AWU delegates from wearing shirts that bear the union's logo in the workplace.
A straddle driver who lost his job as a result of an automation-driven restructure at Patrick Stevedores' Port Botany container terminal has won his job back after the FWC ruled his dismissal was not a genuine redundancy.
The FWC has decried the "normalisation" of a culture of lawlessness within the CFMEU, in decisions refusing two officials' applications for entry permits after they failed the "fit and proper person" test, but granting entry rights to another organiser who allegedly threatened to start a Boral-style "war" against a major construction company.
Unions will push for a legislated "no reduction principle" for penalty rates, in contrast to the Labor policy stance of having them decided by the Fair Work Commission.
Fortescue Metals Group has failed in a bid to block the CEPU from seeking a declaration that it unduly delayed entry to its WA branch secretary after a 2013 workplace fatality, with a court finding WA's non-harmonised OHS laws are no barrier to entering sites under the Fair Work Act.
The FWC has reinstated a senior clinician fired for making "ill-advised" jokes about her hospital director in email exchanges with her supervisor, after finding "the punishment did not fit the crime".
