The Workplace Relations Minister when Work Choices was introduced, Kevin Andrews, has been dropped from the Coalition front bench, while Liberal Party Deputy Leader and Shadow Workplace Relations Minister Julie Bishop will now also be in charge of the business and employment portfolios - but it will be Victorian Liberal Tony Smith, promoted from parliamentary secretary, who will take on Labor's Julia Gillard in the education portfolio.
The tight timetable for award modernisation and simplification under the Rudd Government will require peak bodies and parties to awards to take responsibility for reaching agreement on a range of "fundamental" and process issues, or have the AIRC decide for them, according to its President, Justice Geoffrey Giudice.
The NSW Supreme Court has today ordered a sacked project manager to pay $1.65m in damages plus legal costs to his former employer and three of its directors for sending defamatory emails to the company and to the World Bank.
Transport giant Toll has lost an appeal against a tribunal ruling that it pay $25,000 in damages for racial discrimination against a Muslim former employee who was called "bombchucker" and "Osama Bin Laden" by work colleagues.
Former APESMA executive director Geoff Fary has replaced Richard Marles as ACTU assistant secretary following Marles' election to federal parliament in the Victorian seat of Corio.
The Office of the Employment Advocate's ban on employees taking leave to participate in a national protest against Work Choices wasn't genuinely based on the purported reason of "operational requirements", the Federal Court has ruled.
The Greens have spelt out which areas of federal Labor's IR policy they will seek to amend in the Senate, while the Democrats today said it would "do the ALP no harm" if the Coalition was "stubborn" and "backward-looking" on IR.
The ACTU is continuing its Your Rights at Work campaign to seek changes to the ALP's policy, embarrass employers into not using AWAs, and pressure Coalition senators to support the new Labor government's IR transition bill expected in parliament next February.
