The High Court has upheld a Federal Court full bench finding that state legislation providing a portage long service leave scheme for the Victorian construction industry was not inconsistent with federal instruments providing inferior long service entitlements.
The Federal Government will next month introduce legislation requiring employers to report annually on "tangible" gender-based indicators if they want to tender for government work, the Minister for the Status of Women, Kate Ellis, has announced.
Reprieve for Thomson and Government; Employers say IR inhibits business; Workers locked out; Pacific guest worker deal expands; and Melbourne airport industrial action begins.
In what appears to be a significant win for IR certainty at Woodside, two unions have agreed in principle to a seven-year moratorium on unlawful industrial action on the company's Pluto LNG, Browse LNG and North West Shelf projects, in return for a major reduction in penalties being sought by construction companies against more than 1300 individual employees, and other concessions.
Productivity is not an abstract term to Australian workers, meaning instead “unpaid hours, phone calls out of work and doing more for less”, according to the ACTU Working Australia Census.
In a case that illustrates the difficulties even workplace regulators and educators have in negotiating IR laws, Fair Work Ombudsman Nick Wilson has been obliged to provide an undertaking to Fair Work Australia to clear the way for the approval of his organisation's new three-year agreement.
The NSW Teachers Federation says members will defy IRC anti-strike orders secured by the Department of Education this afternoon and join tomorrow's rally by the State's public sector workers against the O'Farrell Government's wage-cap legislation - a protest now further fuelled by the job cuts announced in yesterday's Budget.
The ABCC has secured its second successful sham contracting prosecution, bringing to only three the number of cases proven under the Workplace Relations or Fair Work Acts.
Productivity has stagnated or gone backwards for the past year while real labour costs have either been flat or increased over the same period, according to ABS data released today. Meanwhile, the RBA Governor has this morning said that he wasn't calling for employees to work longer hours in recently pushing for a new focus on productivity improvement.
