The failure over the past three decades of the terms "employee relations" and "employment relations" to supplant "industrial relations" in popular and specialist spheres demonstrates that reports of IR's death have been greatly exaggerated, according to a paper presented to the IR academics' annual conference today.
In a case highlighting the dangers of failing to engage with underpayments cases, an employer who did not respond to a claim it short-changed a teenage worker by $8000 must now pay him an additional $240,000 in penalties.
The CEPU has been fined $445,000 for historic reporting breaches, a Federal Court judge observing that the penalty would have been higher had the union not moved to clean up its act by employing a compliance officer.
The FWC has found an employer's failure to consult a pregnant worker before abruptly announcing her redundancy to be the "very definition of unfair", rejecting its submissions that a series of meetings were adequate.
An employer that unilaterally reduced the classification levels of two workers previously handed a pay upgrade has failed to convince the FWC it had no power to intervene in a contractual issue "masquerading" as an enterprise agreement dispute.
The FWC in endorsing a deal for the Super Retail Group and its 10,000 employees has published a detailed chronology to demonstrate that "there is no 'go slow' on agreement approvals".
Queensland's IRC is today considering a bid to restrain Queensland Health from dismissing a senior nurse who says she spoke to the media about alleged training flaws in her role as a union delegate, in a case testing the state's new human rights laws and the rights of non-registered unions.
A lawyer has launched a novel adverse action case against a law firm that sacked him within his probationary period, seeking a payout equivalent to nine-months' notice in part because it prevented him from working the minimum notice period by locking him out of its system.
Workers' wages will continue to grow at about 2.2%, similar to the current WPI, partly because the forthcoming 0.5 percentage point rise in compulsory super payments will be mostly funded by forgone pay rises, according to the RBA.
Melbourne's Crown Casino is staring down calls to pay about $4.5 million in employee entitlements owed by the operator of a celebrity restaurant on its premises.
