Coles Supermarkets is a step closer to putting to ballot a single retail deal covering 80,000 workers, after the Fair Work Commission comprehensively rejected a TWU scope order application for online delivery drivers, finding they were an "integrated and integral part" of the company's retail operations.
The licenced aircraft engineers' union is urging the "liberalisation" of union coverage rules, saying that if they didn't exist at all, the industrial unrest that fuelled the bargaining battle between the union and Qantas might have been diminished before the airline dramatically shut down its operations and locked out its workforce in 2011.
A modern award is set to be stripped of a discriminatory clause that has prevented 13 older employees accessing between 40 and 60 weeks redundancy pay over the past 18 months.
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.
An FWC full bench has emphasised that the tribunal should take a "global" rather than "line by line" approach when applying the better off overall test to agreements, while in another ruling the Commission has approved a deal with employer undertakings, despite union misgivings that it was originally voted up by only three employees who have since left the company.
BHP Billiton has nominated the Coalition's right of entry and greenfields amendments, stalled in the Senate, as its first priorities for IR change, telling the Productivity Commission it also wants restrictions on agreement content, faster relief from industrial action and a wound-back adverse action regime.
An "inequity or disparity would exist" if a major public transport company has to rely on HR practitioners with scant experience in the industrial tribunal to defend an unfair dismissal against a seasoned TWU advocate, the FWC has ruled. Meanwhile, the NSW Law Society, in a submission to the Productivity Commission, is seeking an automatic right to legal representation.
The Department of Employment has crunched the numbers on Australia's 122 modern awards, finding that just half provide for weekend penalty loadings, and 26 rule them out.
The CFMEU has failed in a Federal Court bid to be joined to a case before the Fair Work Commission that could test whether employees can be directed to be examined by employer-nominated doctors.
The FWC has refused to issue a new entry permit to an AMWU organiser who engaged in "egregious" conduct during the notorious Westgate Bridge dispute in 2009, and has described as "baffling" a 2011 decision to grant him a permit.
