In the latest of a rash of significant rulings on protected action ballots, the FWC's national practice leader for bargaining has insisted a bus company provide employee details despite its "uncommon concession" to rely on a union's database alone to develop a roll of voters.
Virgin's groundbreaking bid for an intractable bargaining declaration is "the quintessential bargaining scenario which the Parliament would have had in mind when enacting the IBD regime", it claims, while the FWC has allowed the ACTU to intervene in the case.
The FWC decided this week to terminate rather than suspend industrial action at the Australian Rail Track Authority, because the parties' "entrenched" positions made it "unlikely any significant progress would be made" if it ordered a pause, according to newly-released reasons.
The FWC has found no justification for interfering with a union's "statutory right" to three working days notice of industrial action against an "essential service" energy provider, after taking into account a five-point "safety commitment" the ETU put forward in response to the employer's concerns about supply continuity.
BHP has played down the impact of industrial action at its Queensland coal mines, highlighting that the protected action won support from only about 15% of Operations Services production employees in Queensland.
The FWC has refused to suspend engineers' industrial action at a Virgin Australia subsidiary while their employer pursues an intractable bargaining declaration, in an early test of the new Secure Jobs provision.
In the latest of a rash of PABO decisions since new Secure Jobs provisions took effect on June 6, the FWC has ruled that an employer's bid to bypass unions and put its agreement to a vote provides exceptional circumstances to warrant using a non-AEC ballot agent.
Stevedoring giant Qube has failed to overturn a ruling that it should have slashed the minimum number of hours salaried dockworkers needed to work in a year after withholding their pay over 11 weeks of protected industrial action.
The FWC has focused on the difference between "probability" and "possibility" in its reasons for rejecting a bid by a company providing search and rescue services to terminate protected industrial action on the basis that it could endanger lives.
More than 1,000 domestic cabin crew at Qantas have authorised protected action including 24-hour strikes and overtime bans in the lead-up to the busy pre-Christmas travel period, as their union resists the airline's push for longer rostered hours and to hold annual pay rises to 3% as inflation soars.
