The ruling UK Conservative Party will lift the attendance threshold for strike ballots, impose a three month limit on industrial action and clamp down on picketing if it wins next year's election, while Britain's peak union body has called on the government to introduce online voting.
The Productivity Commission in a new report has repeated its call for governments to adopt Victorian-style procurement guidelines to regulate substandard IR conduct in the construction industry, but has warned they might need to be modified to avoid a clash with the Fair Work Act.
The Abbott Government has given the WA Government and third parties the power to apply to the Fair Work Commission to suspend or terminate industrial action that is threatening the economy or endangering health and safety.
The Senate's Education and Employment Legislation Committee has recommended today that the upper house pass the government's Fair Work Amendment Bill unamended, with the ALP and the Greens tabling separate reports opposing the legislation.
Former Prime Minister John Howard says that of the five big economic reforms Australian governments has implemented over the last 30 years, industrial relations is the only one that has gone backwards.
There is "no substance" to the claims of inconsistent FWC decision-making that have underpinned calls for an independent appeal mechanism, according to the tribunal's president, Justice Iain Ross.
The ACTU's bid to remove former senior public servant Tony Cole from this year's annual wage review has failed, after he told the peak body in a consultation hearing this morning that he would not step down because he was not a party to the Audit Commission's recommendation to reduce the minimum wage.
A senior IR lawyer has told the HR Nicholls Society the Fair Work Act should be amended to ban protected industrial action that has serious consequences and to remove entirely the rights of high income earners to strike, in a presentation predicting the decline of the MUA's power and influence.
Labor and the Greens have combined in the Senate today to defeat the Abbott Government's legislation to establish a Registered Organisations Commission and align penalties for union and employer association officials with corporations law.
