The AMWU is considering whether it will seek to intervene when the AWU and MIM apply to have their enterprise agreements certified, in what would now effectively be its last hope of retaining a legal link to the bulk of the company's workforce.
Union officials past and present will comprise two-thirds of delegates at next week's ALP national conference, giving them a disproportionate influence over the party's policymaking, according to Workplace Relations Minister Peter Reith.
Former Prime Minister Paul Keating has labelled AMWU secretary Doug Cameron as isolationist and dismissed his calls for fair rather than free trade as "horrible tripe".
The Federal Court has rejected a pregnant employee's claim that she was constructively dismissed when her employer pressured her to move from full-time to part-time work.
The AMWU ended its national conference yesterday with a commitment to the strategy adopted at its gathering two years earlier: a three-pronged approach to improving wages and conditions that incorporates industry bargaining, award variations, and legislative change.
Workplace Relations Minister Peter Reith has written to Australia's leading industry bodies and its top 200 business executives inviting them to participate in the "emerging debate" on labour market reform. At the same time, he has launched a stinging attack on the Property Council of Australia for its lack of "steel" in the recent Victorian construction dispute, accusing it of raising the "white flag" and maintaining that "you couldn't be worse off than where you are today".
An employer who delayed installing a modem to allow a parliamentary hansard sub-editor with parental and caring responsibilities to work at home two days a week indirectly discriminated against the employee, according to a Victorian tribunal.
In the first fine ordered against a union official for breaching freedom of association laws, an NUW delegate has got off with a $400 penalty while his union has escaped scot free.
In a landmark decision on casual workers' job security, the South Australian IRC has ruled that casual clerks in the state's private sector can choose to become permanents after a year of ongoing and regular employment.
