The NSW Industrial Court has fined the state's nurses and midwives union $130,000 for its "flagrant and unapologetic" flouting of multiple anti-strike orders during pay negotiations with the Minns Government that have since morphed into a major gender undervaluation case.
Eighteen months after retail giant Aldi sought to insert a clause in a proposed agreement to render it immune to same-job, same-pay applications, it is facing a SJSP claim that the SDA says could lift on-hire warehouse workers' base pay by almost a third.
A FWC presidential member has recused himself from re-hearing an agreement variation case after observing that a bystander, "recognising human frailty", might appreciate his disinclination to reach different conclusions based on the same set of facts.
The Offshore Alliance and ETU are up in arms after Bechtel warned them that unless they drop their "intractable" 30% wage demands for the Pluto Train 2 Project by Monday, it will bar them from bargaining meetings and deal only with the AMWU and CFMEU.
The CFMEU has won same-job, same-pay orders that it expects will lift the pay of labour hire doggers, riggers, and crane operators performing shutdown maintenance at a WA gold mine by up to 125%.
Almost a year after orders became available under Labor's landmark same-job, same-pay laws, a review of progress by Workplace Express indicates there have been about 50 decisions, with the MEU, UWU, AMIEU and SDA accounting for more than 70% of them.
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 TWU is threatening strikes in the cash-in-transit industry in three states - with 99% of Victorian Armaguard workers already voting in favour - arguing its hand has been forced by a lack of progress in pay talks, eight months after the union's novel bid to rope-in the industry's major customers to secure pay rises.
Psychiatrist staff specialists in NSW public hospitals have won a temporary 10% "stop-gap" attraction and retention allowance, after a State IRC full bench accepted they had established a special case to address an "acute shortage", partly a result of "comparatively low pay", that is driving a reduction in the quality of mental health care.
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".
