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.
In a move that could significantly delay or derail the certification of the Campaign 2000 break-out group agreements, Workplace Express understands that a significant IR player is considering intervening in their certification on the grounds that they are a multi-employer agreement and must therefore be approved, if at all, by a full bench of the IRC.
In what could be an important test of the ability of non-union employees to validly notify protected industrial action, Esso has this evening applied for s127 orders against industrial action planned by offshore oil workers represented by MUA shelf company MUA-HTS.