Two years after the introduction of radical work practice changes following the bitter 1998 waterfront dispute, productivity on the docks has increased dramatically, to within a whisker of Workplace Relations Minister Peter Reith's 25 containers an hour target.
The Federal Government is intervening in tomorrow"s full bench appeal against an IRC decision that opened the way for thousands of workers who are not entitled to severance pay under awards to claim it via the Workplace Relations Act's termination provisions.
A full bench of the IRC has found that a union ban on employees of contractors doing work at a brewery was "industrial action" under the Workplace Relations Act.
After overseeing a significant reduction in the size of the federal IRC, the Coalition has responded to criticism that it was deliberately weakening the tribunal by announcing four new appointments.
The AMWU has deferred until next year a decision on whether to seek a new award for the labour hire industry or to rope companies it has logged into an existing manufacturing award.
The NSW IRC has found that BHP Refractories acted unfairly in refusing to pay redundancy to an employee who resigned to accept another job after being told the plant he worked at was being sold.
A non-union deal that encourages employees to cash out annual leave and requires them to pay half of dispute mediation costs fails the Workplace Relations Act's no disadvantage test, a full bench of the IRC has found.
Long distance transport companies have won a two-month reprieve from an IRC decision to scrap the hourly-rate benchmark for enterprise agreements and rely instead on a much higher cents-per-kilometre rate.
