An emergency care flight service has withdrawn objections to an ANMF protected action ballot of nurses and midwives, and the FWC has found no reason to block it, after the union inserted a caveat to protect patient safety.
The CEPU's South Australian branch has failed to convince Commissioner Chris Platt in his final ruling before retirement that an employer breached its good faith bargaining obligations by putting a single-enterprise agreement to a vote after the union sought a supported bargaining authorisation.
The FWC has ordered a pharmaceutical company back to negotiations with the UWU for a first enterprise agreement to cover operational employees in non-managerial roles at its Brisbane manufacturing facility, after finding it breached good faith bargaining by offering employees inducements to vote against enterprise talks.
Unions' pursuit of a 24%-over-three-years pay rise for Endeavour Energy workers has fallen short after a FWC full bench instead made an intractable bargaining determination delivering 17.8% over four years, rejecting numerous claims the employer did not bargain in good faith.
A FWC member has criticised a union's "sneaky" application for a protected action ballot at one of nine interconnected workplaces as potentially "dragg[ing]" members into an industrial campaign "they did not authorise".
Bechtel is using good faith bargaining and registered organisations laws in an extraordinary bid to exclude the Offshore Alliance and key officials from bargaining for a Pluto Train 2 Project agreement, after accusing the MEU and AWU partnership of taking an "unnecessarily provocative, obstructionist, unreasonable" approach to negotiations.
The FWC's Collaborative Approaches interest-based bargaining program is a top priority but its capacity to provide the free service is under threat, tribunal President Adam Hatcher has told a NSW IR Society event.
The FWC has rejected an AMWU bid to bargain for a standalone agreement for maintenance workers at BHP's WA iron ore operations, saying any negotiation difficulties are due to the "brevity" and "paucity" of meetings and not that BHP has focused too much on its larger production worker population.
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 MEU says its members at a Peabody underground coal mine near Wollongong have been "blindsided" by the company's week-long lockout of 160 mineworkers, saying it is a disproportionate response to limited protected action.
