Shadow IR Minister Senator Eric Abetz says employer groups are "disconnected" from micro-business owners and has pledged that the Coalition's IR policy will look after the sector. Meanwhile, sources say the party is considering going to the election promising to exempt only very small businesses from unfair dismissal.
ABC Commissioner John Lloyd has lamented the uncertainty for his organisation and the construction industry from Labor's attempts to change the BCII Act and criticised unions for failing to offer "even a modicum of support" for the ABCC, in his second speech in four years to the HR Nicholls Society.
The Federal Government has supported the bulk of the Productivity Commission's recommendations on executive pay - including its "two strikes" proposal - and will look at ways to "clawback" bonuses paid to executives and directors if they are based on misleading financial information.
It was the "blue flue" in the WA construction sector, and now the "Chinese flu" has kept freight train drivers off the job in Victoria. To FWA, however, the latest outbreak was part of coordinated and collective conduct that amounted to industrial action.
A court has fined the owners of a Hobart security company $136,000 after finding they continued to lease luxury cars while repeatedly failing to pay penalties and allowances to their low-paid employees over a two-year period.
A Fair Work Australia full bench has ruled that preferred hours clauses used by aged care and retail employers would have disadvantaged employees, but has quashed on procedural grounds two earlier decisions rejecting the clauses.
The AEU has described as "extremely disappointing" today's meeting between federal and state education ministers, maintaining the latter "publicly fell in line behind the DPM" over the union's threatened boycott of the NAPLAN test - now the subject of an FWO investigation and state IRC proceedings.
In a significant ruling on the Fair Work Act's new scope order provisions, a Fair Work Australia full bench has ruled that Melbourne's firefighters should be covered by three separate agreements, despite employees – including senior officers – backing the union push for a single deal.
