US presidential labour advisor Tom Kochan told 900 delegates at an international IR conference in Sydney today that a key lesson from the global financial crisis is that IR and HR practitioners must become as literate on economic and financial issues as they are on their traditional labour relations turf.
Good faith bargaining will extinguish the direct engagement approach to IR pioneered and spread across Australia by the "Rio Tinto diaspora" of IR practitioners, according to a leading employer-clientele industrial barrister.
Paid parental leave breakthrough possible in US, says academic; Cochlear determination on FWA website; Gillard to visit India; and 43 years since Wave Hill
The Queensland and South Australian IRCs have today awarded increases to their States' minimum rates, meaning all State-covered workers on minimum pay have now won rises despite the AFPC's July federal pay freeze.
US presidential labour advisor Tom Kochan - who will be opening an international IR conference in Sydney next week - has thrown his weight behind landmark American legislation that will introduce a form of "first contract arbitration" - similar to that under Australia's low paid bargaining stream - and boost the ability of unions to organise workers and make agreements.
Bargaining representatives cannot seek bargaining orders once workers have voted on a proposed agreement, even if there is evidence that good faith requirements were not complied with, Fair Work Australia has ruled.
Fair Work Ombudsman Nick Wilson says he is confident his agency's intelligence-gathering and auditing activities will uncover any widespread unlawful use of individual flexibility agreements, despite the absence of any statutory obligations for employers to report they have used them.
