Qantas pilots preparing strike ballot bid; ACTU calls for action on apprentice wages; Bans to start at CSIRO - strikes could be next; and Workplace Express "what's on" page update
A former Queensland local government manager has won $368,000 in compensation after a tribunal found that four local councillors discriminated against and dismissed him because of his perceived relationship with their political opponents.
Employers will have to report annually on "tangible" gender-based pay results rather than "good intentions" to a reinvigorated workplace equal opportunity agency if they want to tender for federal government work, the Minister for the Status of Women, Kate Ellis, announced today.
The Federal Court has fined the CFMEU (construction and general division) and nine of its officials a total of $170,000 over coercive behaviour and unlawful industrial action on Victorian roads projects, while in WA the union and its state assistant secretary, Joe McDonald, have lost an appeal against an earlier penalties ruling.
The federal government has says it is uncertain about the potential financial implications of the SACS equal remuneration case, while the ACTU has urged Fair Work Australia not to take into account the cost to employers of any increase in deciding whether to grant the union claim.
Fair Work Australia has rejected an employer's argument that it should refuse to grant protected action ballots to two unions because they had failed to adequately justify their "very expensive" wage claim.
The NSW Government, in its submission to the ABCC's sham contracting inquiry, says the Fair Work Act's sham contracting provisions make it too difficult for employees to mount successful prosecutions, while Odco independent contracting system pioneer Peter Bosa has dismissed the idea of creating a new class of "dependent contractors" as "an exercise in heuristic oxymoronic hyperbole".
In an important Independent Contracts Act ruling, the Federal Court has found that a restraint clause in a contract between a labour hire company and Woolworths rendered unfair a separate contract between the labour hire company and an IT worker it placed with the retailer.
A textiles employer has failed to stymie a union's strike ballot application on the grounds that it had pursued it prematurely and adopted a pattern of negotiation different to that it had followed at other sites.
