Following on from its wins at Sydney and Melbourne independent bookstores, RAFFWU is leading strikes and work bans at Berkelouw Books and Harry Hartog, where it says workers remain on a small-cohort 2012 "zombie" agreement that the union says pays "poverty wages" and should never have been approved.
A "unique situation" has given a FWC member the confidence to make a rare agreement variation order in circumstances where no common intention during bargaining could be established.
A FWC member has criticised a union's "sneaky" application for a protected action ballot at one of nine interconnected workplaces as potentially "dragg[ing]" members into an industrial campaign "they did not authorise".
The TWU is threatening strikes in the cash-in-transit industry in three states - with 99% of Victorian Armaguard workers already voting in favour - arguing its hand has been forced by a lack of progress in pay talks, eight months after the union's novel bid to rope-in the industry's major customers to secure pay rises.
The Western Mine Workers Alliance is considering industrial action at BHP Iron Ore's South Flank and Area C sites in the Pilbara, after the company put forward a draft "baseline" agreement that fails to provide any annual increases, which unions claim is "extremely rare" in the sector.
Grave diggers and funeral workers are set to vote on strikes and cremation bans after the FWC rejected claims that no amount of notice will avert "significant consequences", while also backing the AWU's objection to the employer's proposed survey of its workforce to gauge its views.
The MEU says its members at a Peabody underground coal mine near Wollongong have been "blindsided" by the company's week-long lockout of 160 mineworkers, saying it is a disproportionate response to limited protected action.
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.
The ETU has lodged an urgent Federal Court bid to challenge FWC orders that suspended industrial action across Sydney's trains network until July, arguing a full bench wrongly treated rail unions as an "undifferentiated whole" and unreasonably advantaged the employers.
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.
