The author of a book tracing 150 years of campaigning for a shorter Australian working week says it offers crucial lessons for current efforts to win a four-day work week, cut unpaid overtime, and properly account for domestic labour, while AMWU national secretary Steve Murphy considers it part of a "just transition".
In its first use of the new power to unilaterally amend the terms of substandard proposed agreements, the FWC has signalled it will rewrite provisions in three Aldi enterprise deals that leave storepersons worse off, to enable their approval.
Workers at Woodside's Pluto 2 LNG expansion in the Pilbara have overwhelmingly voted down head contractor Bechtel's proposed agreement, while Rio Tinto's Paraburdoo iron ore workers are set to receive a pay rise, announced shortly after unions kicked-off their majority support campaign.
The ETU's WA branch is pushing to bargain for a separate agreement for continuing electrical, instrumentation or plumbing workers at the massive Pluto 2 LNG expansion, to uncouple from employees who will be demobilised as the construction phase ends, and is urging workers to vote down a pay offer that "does not pass the pub test".
A leading employment and IR barrister says the four-day working week, working from home and the right to disconnect are part of an unavoidable reorganisation of working hours that is set to become "the big issue of our time".
A model working from home clause in a key award should avoid contributing to remote workers working "long and unsociable hours", address employer provision of equipment and apply to all employees, according to a Centre for Future Work report.
A union delegate's "at best negligent and at worst foolhardy" practice of filling in his timesheets inaccurately did not warrant his summary dismissal, because his employer failed to establish that he deliberately set out to deceive it, the FWC has found.
In a judgment that will ripple through a FWC case considering the way homecare, disability and social workers are paid for shifts immediately before or after sleepovers, the Federal Court has rejected FWO arguments that penalty rates should apply.
Just 6% of clerical workers who seek WFH arrangements are knocked back by their employer, according to a new Swinburne University study commissioned by the FWC as part of the work from home test case.
