The Fair Work Ombudsman is taking a labour hire company to court for unlawfully deducting $500 fines from migrant workers' pay when they breached its drug and alcohol policy.
A parliamentary inquiry has recommended the Albanese Government consider amending the Fair Work Act's right to request flexible work to ensure menopausal women can access it, while it also wants reproductive leave added to the NES and awards.
The Health Services Union has won 12 days paid reproductive leave in a deal for about 1600 disability service workers, in a "watershed" development it says could be expanded nationwide, as it bargains to entrench the entitlement in five further agreements.
South Australia's Malinauskas Government is likely to soon secure passage of legislation establishing a portable long service leave scheme for the community services sector, with potential to build on it to include other sectors in future.
Mining giant Peabody has won special leave from the High Court to challenge a full Federal Court finding that it did not genuinely make workers redundant when it failed to consider whether it could redeploy workers to jobs performed by contractors.
FWC president Adam Hatcher will convene a directions hearing next month into the Commission's own-initiative case to develop a "workable" award clause that removes impediments to working from home.
Two recycling industry workers have been allowed to keep 30% of their redundancy payments after the FWC accepted that while their former employer found them acceptable alternative employment, it involved moving from a "nice, clean" office to a "dusty, malodorous" one.
