At an extraordinary special general meeting today, Victorian Allied Health Professionals Association members have overwhelmingly voted against a planned amalgamation with HACSU, but it might not be enough to stop the merger.
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.
The author of a book tracing 150 years of campaigning for a shorter Australian working week says it offers crucial lessons for current efforts to win a four-day work week, cut unpaid overtime, and properly account for domestic labour, while AMWU national secretary Steve Murphy considers it part of a "just transition".
In an "industry-first", a newly-approved union agreement covering editorial employees at news publications including Crikey and The Mandarin explicitly prohibits AI from replacing human employees and requires all output to have human oversight.
FWC general manager Murray Furlong has called for major construction companies to start playing their part in stamping out corruption in the industry, while the Wood inquiry will this week hear evidence from leaders of the AWU's Queensland branch and the Queensland Council of Unions.
Former CFMEU construction and general division Queensland branch leaders Michael Ravbar and Jade Ingham directed membership payments to the state-registered union rather than the federally-registered entity, leaving members without voting power, in a move that might have been intended to "create an impregnable fiefdom into which the national organisation could not reach", administrator Mark Irving KC said today.
The UWU says it has won pay rises of up to $30,000 a year for nearly 700 on-hire warehouse workers through five same-job, same-pay applications tellingly unresisted by employers, while the SDA is now embedding SJSP clauses in its supply chain agreements.
The Federal Court has temporarily restrained a trustee from winding up a purported income protection fund that a FWC full bench found had paid the UFU a $1.6 million "secret commission".
The Wood inquiry into the CFMEU's activities in Queensland will put construction division administrator Mark Irving KC on the stand in a hearing this week.
Queensland's Crisafulli Government is removing the former Labor administration's best practice pay and conditions procurement guidelines for new State-funded construction projects, following the release of a State productivity commission report, while the Wood inquiry has appointed new counsel assisting, ahead of its first substantive hearings.
