Work and family parliamentary inquiry starts; IR campaign likely for new US-style on-line organisation; and AWU claims unfair dismissal over sub-award wages and conditions.
Increase of 13.5% over three years for Victorian ambulance service employees; Victorian police threaten industrial action while leader denies joining Liberal Party; Building Taskforce to appeal Pine v Doyle ruling; and Beazley pledges to give minimum wage-setting back to the AIRC.
Just six weeks after saying that the ALP's policy on scrapping AWAs was unchanged, Opposition Leader Kim Beazley today told journalists that "we are going to abolish the capacity of Australian Workplace Agreements to undermine collective awards".
The Prime Minister, John Howard, today said it was "nonsense" to suggest the Federal Government's IR reforms would "chisel" workers out of Anzac Day, Christmas Day or other public holidays, but refused to say how they would be protected.
The High Court has today refused on technical grounds to issue an interlocutory injunction to stop the Howard Government continuing its spending on a $20 million advertising campaign to promote its second wave IR changes.
The Victorian construction industry's go-early agreement has today been ticked off by DEWR as code compliant, while the CFMEU (NSW branch) has redrafted its latest pattern deal to address DEWR-identified breaches. In both states, the agreements retain provisions that the department warns "may cause breaches through their practical application".
Workplace Relations Minister Kevin Andrews says he still expects to introduce his second wave package to Parliament in October, despite the massive task involved in rewriting the IR legislation from scratch.
An AIRC full bench majority has certified a new s170LC multi-employer agreement covering more than 750 journalists at more than 2,000 weekly non-daily newspapers across Australia.