The ACTU's submission to the Senate inquiry into the fairness test legislation says the bill merely tinkers at the edges of fundamentally flawed regulation, but proposes significant changes, including widening the benchmark for the test and scrapping the $75,000 income cap and the Workplace Authority's capacity to take into account workers' personal circumstances.
The Australian Industry Group supports the Howard Government's fairness test legislation, but wants to change the formula for setting the $75,000 a year income cap and to ensure the test doesn't become a "device" to extend protected award conditions to award-free workers.
NSW legislates to guarantee special APEC public holiday entitlements; AIRC upholds summary dismissal for harassment; Qantas catering worker fails in raft of claims; Nareen Young takes over as head of Diversity Council; and SBS program focuses on Work Choices.
The ILO will on Thursday examine whether Australia's IR laws comply with international labour standards – a development Workplace Relations Minister Joe Hockey today sought to portray as the result of the ACTU "acting against Australia's interest internationally".
A Sri Lankan-born correctional services officer whose supervisor took him off the roster at a jail’s control centre because she said she couldn’t understand him has won a racial discrimination case.
ABC Commissioner John Lloyd has this afternoon written to the CFMEU, saying he had not alleged that a union official threatened to kill an ABCC inspector, but the union says he hasn't gone far enough.
Victoria Police has charged a Melbourne man with assaulting and threatening to kill a public official, but the CFMEU says the ABCC was wrong to allege a union official was involved in the incident.
The NSW IRC has adjourned an application by the CFMEU to include long service leave provisions in a state award, pending a Federal Court appeal by 16 mining companies on the Work Choices laws' exclusion of state powers.
Parties wanting to challenge agreements approved by the Workplace Authority under the new fairness test would have to go to the High Court, according to legal advice to the ACTU from Maurice Blackburn Cashman.
