Federal Parliament has passed a trio of bills that establish the Parliamentary Workplace Support Service as an independent statutory HR agency and overhaul employment arrangements for parliamentary staff.
Employers can comply with the new "positive duty" to eliminate sexual harassment and sex discrimination by fostering a respectful culture, ensuring workers have avenues to report incidents, and taking a "risk-based" approach to prevention, according to Human Rights Commission guidance.
The FWC has thrown out a cafe's argument that a worker who performed a single paid "trial shift" had not yet been engaged and could not bring a general protections case against it.
A leading IR lawyer says the Albanese Government's third tranche casuals provisions are a win for employers as they will provide "considerable certainty", but he predicts an ambiguous independent contracting test will produce "windfall gains and windfall losses".
The High Court has today unanimously held that Qantas took unlawful adverse action against nearly 2000 former ground crew when it outsourced their jobs at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, when their agreements were due to nominally expire.
The Fair Work Act's continuing focus on single-enterprise bargaining, along with weak underpinning awards and supported bargaining's restriction to multi-employer rather than sector-wide bargaining, will limit the new stream's capacity to achieve "decent wages" for low-paid female employees, according to leading IR academics.
The FWC has rejected the HSU's bid to extend a zombie deal for two years, backing the ASU's position in finding it failed the BOOT, and granting only a four month reprieve to negotiate a new agreement.
A logistics company has failed to win approval for a greenfields deal as it only notified the MUA's WA branch despite provisions for future national expansion, and it offers "substantially inferior" pay and conditions.
