The MEU has opened up another front in its continuing battles with BHP, claiming in a new Federal Court case that the mining giant is breaching award provisions by failing to give its Operations Services in-house labour hire workforce Christmas and Boxing Day off and not seeking majority support for regular shifts in excess of 10 hours.
The FWC has observed that an employer "is not a charity", in rejecting a claim from a former risk manager for an insolvent cryptocurrency trader that his award-covered role did not change despite successive $50,000 promotions over just 15 months.
Woolworths has failed in its bid to vary the Retail Award to "clarify" that the instrument covers its burgeoning online fulfilment operations, avoiding potentially significant knock-on effects for the e-commerce, road transport and distribution industries.
In a decision highlighting the difficulties that can arise from agreement clauses linked to awards and the NES, the FWC has handed back Simplot workers' arbitration rights for casual conversion disputes but removed mention of their entitlement to access permanency after nine months.
The NSW IRC has rejected a senior public servant's bid to suppress her suspension for alleged corrupt conduct, holding to the notion of open justice while questioning why she failed to make the application earlier.
A Federal Court majority has today dealt a hammer blow to NSW's and Victoria's pursuit of employers alleged to have avoided long service leave entitlements to casuals, ruling that a tribunal's reading of the Fair Work Act's LSL provision produced an "absurdity" whereby employers received "no warning" they could be held criminally liable for supposed non-payments.
A judge irked by a multinational company's attempt to cast its underpaying subsidiary's award breaches as the court's "alternate interpretation" has imposed a near-maximum fine.
In what it claims is its first litigation seeking to have a holding company found responsible for its subsidiaries' breaches, the FWO has initiated court action against ASX-listed Super Retail Group for self-reported underpayments of more than $1 million that led to an internal audit and backpayments exceeding $50 million that the watchdog says remain short of the mark.
A full Federal Court has knocked back a traffic management company's attempt to overturn the FWC's rejection of a proposed non-union deal and has given it a clip around the ears for the way it ran the case.
The HSU is seeking in a Federal Court action to establish that outsourced kitchen and food services work performed in aged care facilities is covered by the industry's award rather than the lower-paying hospitality award.
