Workplace Relations Minister Julia Gillard has responded to horticultural employers' concerns and directed the AIRC to allow flexible hours and casuals' piece rates to continue in the industry's new modern award. She has also varied her award modernisation request to acknowledge union concerns over in-house call centre workers' safety net, and asked the Commission to look at part-time penalty rates in the retail and pharmacy sectors.
University of Sydney Professor of Law Ron McCallum has predicted the ILO will find the Fair Work Act fails to comply with its freedom of association and collective bargaining conventions and says Australia in the long run won’t be able to ignore it, in a speech in which he also argued Australian labour law has had a long and continuing “obsession” with fairness.
Hydro Tasmania to fight ETU scope order bid; Dates set for Virgin Blue hearing; NUW seeks Federal Court backing for rule change; Opposition attacks Government over horticulture award; Hart throws hat into ring for Bradfield; and Programme set for construction hearings.
The Victorian Supreme Court has found a labour-hire company's restraint of trade provisions were excessively restrictive and has rejected its bid for an interlocutory injunction against a former employee.
Four in every ten manufacturers in Denmark have made enterprise deals that provide “win-win” flexible working hours arrangements, according to a visiting academic, but the emergence of “flexitime jealousy” has diverted union delegates in some workplaces into mediating disputes between workers with access to flexibility and those without.
CEPU members at Australia Post will vote in a protected action ballot in coming weeks, following a Fair Work Australia ruling yesterday that the union has dropped claims for prohibited content and is genuinely trying to reach agreement.
UnionsWA is prepared for a fight if the inquiry into the state's IR system recommends a return to Work Choices-style laws, the peak body's new secretary, Simone McGurk, says.
FWA has refused to approve two more collective agreements - this time for related companies - because the employers didn't notify employees of their bargaining representation rights.
The LHMU (WA branch) was justified in sacking an organiser for telling a colleague she was an "a--e-licker" for having lunch with the union's secretary and calling senior officials "a bunch of f--kers", the WA IRC has found.
