Airline operations across Australia could be disrupted by industrial action as soon as next month after air traffic controllers' union Civil Air this week won AIRC orders for a strike ballot of its members.
About 60,000 NSW public school and TAFE teachers will receive a 4.4% pay rise backdated to January 1 and 3.8% increases in January 2010 and 2011, after the NSW Teachers Federation and the State Government accepted a NSW IRC recommendation to resolve their long-running dispute.
Some 3,000 Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs employees have won improved parental leave entitlements and a 14.1% pay rise over three years under a new union collective agreement.
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull have found themselves in uncommon agreement on the need for unions and workers to help avoid job losses by exercising restraint during the economic downturn.
The only non-Labor State Government has criticised the Fair Work Bill for extending union rights and exposing employers to "coercive" arbitration in its submission to the Senate inquiry into the proposed laws.
Workers at Alcoa's three alumina refineries in Western Australia look set to defer the 2009 pay rises prescribed in their enterprise agreements in a bid to secure their jobs against the gloomy economic outlook.
Adelaide University's Professor Andrew Stewart has criticised the Fair Work Bill's failure to allow reviews when employers refuse an employee's request for flexible work and its restrictions on agreement content, describing the latter as "the one aspect of the Bill which represents an unequivocal departure from Forward with Fairness".
The Ai Group has called for a major overhaul of the Fair Work legislation's agreement-making rules, including the abolition of the new low paid bargaining stream, in its submission to the Senate inquiry into the bill.
Superannuation interest groups have attacked the default fund provisions in modern awards, saying they constitute "mandated" monopolies and oligopolies that favour industry super funds.
The AIRC has upheld a Coles Group subsidiary's dismissal of a storeworker for eating a Snickers bar thrown to him by another worker after it fell out of a broken box.
