Almost 2500 Dick Smith Electronics employees will lose their jobs, after the company's receivers announced this afternoon that they will close 301 stores in Australia after failing to find a buyer.
Doubts remain over $31 million in entitlements owed to 800 current and former Queenland Nickel employees unless the company's administrators can secure fresh investment in coming months.
The AWU is calling for the corporate regulator to investigate whether Queensland Nickel breached corporations laws and whether owner Clive Palmer is acting as a "shadow director", as part of the union's push to secure members' outstanding entitlements.
Two employees have failed to win back more than 2,000 hours in sick leave credits they lost when their employment moved from a publicly owned corporation to a private entity after the NSWIRC found there was no transfer of employment.
The Fair Work Commission has dismissed a multinational contracting company's attempt to bypass its severance obligations in an important decision on the definition of the "ordinary and customary turnover of labour" in the contracting and labour hire industries.
A Roy Morgan Research subsidiary plans to take to the High Court its claim that payments to contractors should be taken to include all award entitlements, after a failed full court appeal that director Gary Morgan says has "massive implications" for other companies.
The AMWU has responded to the continued loss of Australian manufacturing jobs and falling union membership by making 11 officials redundant in Victoria and NSW over recent months.
The Federal Circuit Court has found a newspaper publisher took adverse action when it forced a full-time journalist to sign a take-it-or-leave it statement reducing him to two days a week - with unspecified entitlements to be paid in instalments - and sacked him when he complained.
Australia could consider adopting a Kiwi-style statutory good faith obligation after the High Court's finding that there is no implied duty of mutual trust and confidence in employment contracts, according to a senior law academic.
A Fair Work Commission full bench has rejected Glencore Xstrata's challenge to orders requiring the company to provide the tribunal with documents relating to its staffing decisions last year at its Collinsville open cut coal mine.
