Workplace Relations Minister Murray Watt is holding parallel negotiations with the Greens and the Opposition in a bid to muster support to pass legislation clearing the way to appoint an administrator to the CFMEU's construction division.
A FWC full bench has dismissed an employer's objections to extending a zombie agreement for a second time, because moving the covered employees onto the award might "disturb the basis" upon which bargaining for a replacement deal is proceeding.
The ASU has won a supported bargaining authorisation to bolster negotiations with the ACT Government for a multi-enterprise deal for social and community services workers employed by 17 funding-reliant organisations.
The HSU has removed Victorian No. 1 branch secretary Diana Asmar from its national executive until the FWC concludes an investigation into her conduct, but says she is refusing to stand aside from her branch leadership role.
The aviation industry is now firmly on the frontlines of the battle to equalise pay for directly-employed and labour hire workers working side-by-side, after cabin crew unions made further applications for same-job, same-pay orders against labour suppliers to the Qantas group.
Mining unions emboldened by Labor's reformed IR laws have called on Rio Tinto to come to the negotiating table ahead of bargaining at BHP's Pilbara iron ore operations that might achieve the first union agreement for production workers in a decade.
The CFMEU construction division's Queensland branch has suffered multiple setbacks in its bargaining stoush with the head contractor of the state's $7 billion Cross River Rail project, with workers voting up a new deal put directly by the company and the FWC separately issuing two orders stopping unprotected industrial action.
A notable difference between the federal legislation putting the CFMEU's construction division into administration and the FWC general manager's court application is that the former takes control of all state and territory branches, according to labour law academic Anthony Forsyth.
A FWC member has found no plausible reason for a boilermaker's co-workers and managers to conspire to have him sacked for allegedly drawing a p-nis on a client's fuel tanker, concluding that the more likely explanation lay in a colleague's suggestion that he simply had a "brain fart".
