As she prepares to step down after 12 years, the world's top union leader, former ACTU president Sharan Burrow, has hailed the Albanese Labor Government for moving swiftly to overhaul Australia's IR laws, including the planned introduction of multi-employer bargaining.
The FWC has this morning suspended towage company Svitzer's protected industrial action for six months, averting a 17-port lockout after finding it threatened to endanger welfare and significantly damage the economy.
Qantas has this morning won special leave from the High Court to challenge the full Federal Court ruling that it took unlawful adverse action against its former ground crew employees when it shunned a TWU in-house tender and outsourced the work of 2000 ground-handlers.
The FWC has awarded a wrongfully sacked childcare worker falsely accused of child abuse $33,500 in compensation and criticised the employer's "litany of mistakes" after it adopted a disciplinary process recommended by its external IR advisors.
The FWC has made it clear that Svitzer's planned national lockout at noon tomorrow now won't proceed, but it will decide tomorrow whether to suspend or terminate the protected action.
Key crossbench Senator David Pocock says the vast majority of the Albanese Government's Secure Jobs, Better Pay Bill is "good to go" and he is committed to working through his concerns about the rest of it in the next few weeks, including locking-in a review of the legislation.
The TWU will meet the administrators of Deliveroo Australia this afternoon to push for greater compensation for about 15,000 riders and drivers who worked for the food delivery company before it abruptly stopped trading yesterday.
The past decade's decline in agreement coverage from 23% to just 12% of workers explains about half of the coincident reduction in wages, while the Secure Job's Bill's changes to bargaining, agreement termination and the FWC's powers are likely to almost restore coverage and boost wage growth by 1.6 percentage points a year, according to Centre for Future Work analysis.
The FWC has accepted that a senior software developer's unfair dismissal application was filed one minute late because of the "high risk" last-day strategy of a union lawyer laid low by nicotine withdrawal.
