The NTEU has struck deals with at least six universities that deliver pay rises of a minimum 16% until mid-2012 and at the same time increase job security for casuals and employees on fixed term contracts, winding back some of the Coalition's sector-specific IR changes.
Automotive unions and Ford are close to a new agreement that delivers workers a wage rise of about 8.5% over three years, but delays the first increment until July next year. Fair Work Australia, meanwhile, in an important ruling on the place of scope issues in bargaining, has granted the unions' application for a protected action ballot at the company.
Former High Court judge Michael Kirby has renewed his attack on the "industrial ayatollahs" who criticise Australia's IR system, deploring them as "dogmatists" who "learn nothing from the past", while he has also called for the ILO to take more action to outlaw discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
FWA has rejected a protected action ballot application on the ground that the union was seeking non-permitted content on the use of labour hire workers, but has upheld two other applications after finding union claims on the issue did not breach the "matter pertaining" rule.
South Australia's Catholic schools are not entitled to delay bargaining while they wait for a ministerial declaration allowing them to bargain as a single interest employer, Fair Work Australia has ruled.
The ASU will seek a pay equity order to win pay rises of 20%-plus for the nation's 200,000 social and community services employees, in a major test case – backed by the federal government and the ACTU – on the Fair Work Act's equal remuneration provisions.
Big W's 25,000-plus employees will receive a 9.9% wage rise over three years and junior rates will be abolished for 20-year-olds under a new deal negotiated with the SDA.
A court has taken into account in fining an Xstrata subsidiary $22,000 that workers it retrenched in breach of their enterprise agreement had no other recourse, because of Work Choices' 100-employee threshold for unfair dismissal claims.
CEPU members employed at Telstra are poised to strike on Friday and take further industrial action in the weeks ahead after a breakdown in negotiations for a new enterprise agreement.
