Transgrid workers have won pay rises totalling 17.5% over three years after the FWC on Friday provided closure on a hard-fought campaign by making an intractable bargaining determination splitting the difference between employer and union proposals.
Mining unions have applied to the FWC for a majority support determination to force Rio Tinto to the bargaining table with workers at its Paraburdoo iron ore operations, while an IR researcher says in a forthcoming book that Pilbara workers' ambitious demands at the height of union power more than four decades ago can provide lessons for unions today.
The FWC has rebuffed an employer's bid to suppress the identities of employees cited in a manager's witness statement for an intractable bargaining case, after highlighting that they had not sought that their conversations or names be kept secret.
In a novel move, unions are seeking to bring forward by 14 weeks the end of the strike-suspending s425 order won by NSW rail employers, arguing that it has failed to achieve its stated purpose of bridging the differences between parties, who they claim have moved further apart during FWC-supervised talks.
The UWU has defeated a federal government attempt to end strikes by Serco employees running immigration detention centres, after the FWC found it not unusual for detainees to climb on roofs, set off fire alarms or endure brief lockdowns, as occurred during the industrial action.
A FWC full bench says it suspended industrial action afflicting Sydney's rail network partly to give the RTBU's leadership a chance to "re-establish a greater degree of control" amid suggestions some workers have been going rogue in pushing for a more radical approach.
The NSW Government's urgent tandem bid today to pause industrial action that is causing chaos across the Sydney train network will be heard by the FWC in two expedited hearings tomorrow and on Wednesday, while President Adam Hatcher has recommended that unions suspend industrial action to aid a possible resolution.
ACTU president Michele O'Neil has accused Nippon Paper's Opal subsidiary of abusing its power by locking out about 300 workers from a Latrobe Valley mill for three weeks and counting, after seven CFMEU members took six hours of protected action.
In a significant judgment on the statutory nature of a "proposed enterprise agreement", a Federal Court has rejected arguments that rail unions lost protection of their industrial action once the bargaining focus changed from a single to a multi-employer deal.
Unprotected industrial action undermines collective negotiations because it is "directly contrary" to the Fair Work Act's bargaining regime, Deputy President Gerard Boyce has held in his reasons for finding the UWU's "unlawful" picketing of Woolworths distribution centres breached its good faith bargaining obligations.
