The GST inflation spike has disappeared from the latest quarterly CPI, with ABS data released today showing an increase in prices of just 0.3% for the December quarter and 5.8% for the year.
The CFMEU has won back its representation rights at Rio Tinto subsidiary Comalco's Weipa mine, almost a decade after the company and the AWU convinced the IRC to remove them.
The IRC has given the licenced aircraft engineers' union exclusive coverage of workers at a Qantas site, after finding an AMWU campaign against the airline's labour supplier, Forstaff, cost the company $15m a year in lost business.
The ACTU's blueprint for union renewal, unions@work, has been the catalyst for the CPSU to introduce internal reforms to arrest its declining membership.
A mining company's refusal to allow an illiterate worker any union representation while counselling him prior to his dismissal was a breach of procedural fairness - even though the worker was on an AWA, the IRC has found.
Workers covered by AWAs are much less likely to be guaranteed a wage increase during the life of their agreement then those under collective deals, according to Sydney University IR research body, ACIRRT.
Some 800 maintenance and repair employees at BHP's Port Kembla steelworks are expected to go on strike for 24 to 48 hours on Monday after a stopwork meeting over the company's plans to outsource around 300 maintenance jobs.
The IRC has refused to certify non-union agreements for two security companies that maintained that under the terms of the contracts they had won they couldn't afford to pay the weekend award rate for casuals.
Yallourn Energy will write to the President of the IRC, Justice Geoffrey Giudice, seeking a directions hearing for the compulsory arbitration of a new award following a private conference with unions yesterday.
In a move that would substantially broaden the range of traineeships accessible to both employers and employees, the ACCI has applied to the IRC to vary the National Training Wage Award.
