Workers would be earning $350 more a week if wages had kept up with productivity growth since 2000, and and in its productivity pursuit the Albanese Government should focus on pushing wealth down the income scale by strengthening labour laws and institutions, rather than perpetuating the "trickle down" myth, according to new Australia Institute research.
The ACTU will use next month's economic reform roundtable to demand the Albanese Government compel employers to reach AI "implementation agreements" with workers that guarantee job security and any necessary retraining before they can introduce the technology.
The Productivity Commission will be seeking feedback on soon-to-be-released draft recommendations for next month's economic reform roundtable, as it calls for the adoption of a "growth mindset" to renew Australia's "sputtering" productivity growth.
Resilience, productivity and sustainability will be the focus of the looming economic reform roundtable, and RBA governor Michelle Bullock, Productivity Commission chair Danielle Wood and treasury secretary Jenny Wilkinson will each kick off a day of the three-day assembly, Treasurer Jim Chalmers said today.
Assistant productivity minister Andrew Leigh says Australians have used about a quarter of the post-1980 productivity dividend to "work less", as he revisited a 1930 John Maynard Keynes prediction that people in 2030 "would inherit a world shaped by rising productivity and the promise of abundance".
The "labour productivity bubble" that arose during the COVID-19 pandemic can provide lessons for the future, and hybrid working can be more beneficial to productivity than wholly working from home or the workplace, according to a new Productivity Commission report.
Just 6% of clerical workers who seek WFH arrangements are knocked back by their employer, according to a new Swinburne University study commissioned by the FWC as part of the work from home test case.
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.
Woolworths has today made an urgent application seeking that the FWC make orders to halt striking UWU members from "blocking access" to a Melbourne warehouse and three others in Victoria and NSW that has cost the business a claimed $50 million in sales.
The FWC has warned employers against giving "generic and blanket HR answers" when they provide their "reasonable business grounds" for knocking back flexibility requests, before ultimately rejecting a bid from a worker with challenging caring responsibilities to continue working entirely from home.
