The battle over paid maternity leave intensified yesterday, with Sex Discrimination Commissioner Pru Goward telling a Sydney business audience the entitlement was "dirt cheap" at $350m a year, while Finance Minister Nick Minchin said the $415m to $780m cost would be a "major new burden on taxpayers".
An employer that failed to pay one of its workers for a day that he appeared in the Commission has been ordered to reimburse him and amend his attendance record.
More than 12,000 workers at KFC and Taco Bell retail outlets have won a $44-a-week pay rise and improved unpaid maternity leave entitlements under two identical enterprise agreements certified in the IRC today.
The AMWU has failed in its ambitious bid to win severance payments for casual labour hire employees working on ADI's Minehunter project, in a decision which the AiG says punches a major hole in the ACTU's coming test case claim for redundancy entitlements for casuals.
A new discussion paper by the Cole Royal Commission has floated the idea of developing a new standard national definition of "employee" that would encompass dependent contractors.
The IRC has rejected an AWA that discounted the award rate of pay by more than $2 an hour, in a ruling that clarifies the ground rules for approving substandard AWAs under the public interest test.
Stegbar workers locked out for the past seven days will return to work tomorrow, after the company reached in-principle agreement with unions and agreed to drop legal proceedings against the AWU.
Employers might be hampered from taking a tough stance where a picket line is affecting their workplace, after the NSW Court of Appeal upheld a finding that a Patrick Stevedores supervisor forced to cross a rowdy picket line suffered a psychological injury during the bitter 1998 docks dispute.
Workers employed by one of the world's largest call centre companies, TeleTech, have threatened to walk off the job for 24 hours next week unless the company delivers what the union claims is thousands of dollars in unpaid wages.
A NSW IRC full bench will tomorrow hear a bid to stay interim orders that have prevented an employer organisation's members from offering s170LK federal non-union agreements.
