A court has found a husband and wife who performed largely home-based clerical work exclusively for one business before their services were further outsourced were employees rather than contractors because the company had an "undoubted authority to control" the relationship.
A cleaner who invoiced as both a sole trader and a company but claims he was an employee is pursuing Woolworths and three contracting businesses for more than $300,000 in underpaid wages and unpaid overtime, annual leave and superannuation he says he should have been paid between 2004 and 2015.
Employers should be unable to terminate enterprise agreements that leave workers worse off, according to a Senate inquiry considering so-called 'corporate avoidance' of the Fair Work Act.
The FWC has accepted that BHP Billiton's sacking of a worker who raised his safety visor to get a better look at an exploding smelter at a uranium mine was justified but harsh, stopping short of reinstatement, though, because of the company's "rational" loss of trust and confidence in him.
Workers at Laing O'Rourke Australia Construction have approved variations to their NSW enterprise agreement, after the Fair Work Commission recently warned that almost 3,000 jobs would be at risk unless the deal was made code-compliant.
The Fair Work Ombudsman says it will use new coercive investigation powers as a "last resort" against employers that systematically fail to meet their obligations.
The wages share of the economy has dropped to a 53-year low, according to according to ABS data released today, while the Reserve Bank's governor last night suggested that the laws of supply and demand will eventually push up pay.
