A FWC presidential member has clarified the Commission's "global" approach to the BOOT and warned that agreements that pay only slightly above-award will attract greater scrutiny, in rejecting a West Australian coffee chain's proposed agreement.
The 25% exemption rate the Ai Group has proposed for an estimated one million workers covered by the clerical award "does not adequately compensate" for the loss of penalty rates and overtime, according to ASU national secretary Emeline Gaske.
Ahead of a 10-day full bench hearing of a bid to significantly shake-up the retail award, the ACTU has hit out at employers backing measures to "buy-out" core conditions for workers on as little as $53,680 a year, ditch "smokos" and introduce split shifts.
Lawyers behind an underpayments class action on behalf of more than 20,000 junior doctors say a $230 million settlement reached with NSW Health is the largest in the nation's legal history and represents a "seismic shift".
The SDA has pledged to stake out and help slay the "new zombie agreements" following a FWC decision to terminate Billabong's 2012 national deal at the conclusion of its peak trading period, while the union is also leaping into the crowded KFC class action space.
Shine Lawyers says the exclusion of thousands of SDA members from its McDonald's class action will "inform future interplay" between union and non-union representative proceedings, while a full court ruling has set a "powerful precedent" for using collective action to protect workers' rights.
Shine and RAFFWU are preparing a class action against KFC to win compensation for potentially tens of thousands of workers allegedly denied proper rest breaks, weeks after the Federal Court slammed the SDA over its approach to McDonald's rest breaks litigation and decided its case should run concurrently with an earlier Shine/RAFFWU proceeding.
A judge who rejected a SDA bid to prioritise its breaks case against McDonald's by staying an earlier RAFFWU-backed class action has contrasted the "lacklustre and misdirected approach" of the country's second-largest union with that of the unregistered, seven-year-old union and its lawyers.
The FSU says Commonwealth Bank retail workers forced to work through their 10-minute tea breaks for the past six years will be compensated, after it won a $3 million settlement of its $45 million Federal Court claim.
Australian workplace laws have a "legislative preference" for registered unions to act as a "specific vehicle" for workers seeking to enforce their rights under industrial instruments, the Federal Court has heard.
