AWAs that could eliminate overtime costs through the annualised hours provisions of Work Choices are being offered by stationery company Esselte Australia at its Sydney distribution centre, according to the NUW.
While the number of Australians working in the "non-traditional" sector has now reached 3.3 million, the sector's share of the total workforce has remained largely unchanged since 1998, according to the Productivity Commission.
Labor today used the Spotlight AWAs to accuse Prime Minister John Howard of selling out workers' rights for two cents an hour, in a parliamentary question time dominated by IR and East Timor, while the Government has used its numbers to defeat an Opposition bid to disallow the Work Choices Regulations.
ACT teachers are set to take part in the biggest secret ballot yet on strike action under Work Choices, after the AIRC this afternoon granted the AEU's s451 application.
AWAs being offered to new employees by the Spotlight group in NSW could cut workers' pay by more than $90 a week through the abolition of penalty rates, overtime loadings and paid rest breaks, according to the ALP.
The AIRC has rejected the first unfair dismissal case under Work Choices' "100 or fewer" employees rule, but will hear a related claim of unlawful termination of nine factory workers by Melbourne-based manufacturer Triangle Cables.
John Holland Group Pty Ltd and its IR general manager, Stephen Sasse, are suing publisher John Fairfax over an allegedly defamatory article in its Australian Financial Review newspaper.
The ABCC won't prosecute the CFMEU over an unauthorised stopwork meeting at a Hooker Cockram site in Melbourne and says the builder isn't obliged to deduct four hours pay from the workers, but would be justified in docking them for 20 minutes.
In what unions claim is another example of bureaucracy gone mad under Work Choices, the AIRC today ordered a separate secret ballot for industrial action for a single ETU member at a Victorian factory where the AMWU has already won a similar order covering other employees.
A full bench of the AIRC has put to an end the maritime unions' long-running bid to get up federal award coverage of permit ships with foreign crew. Any chance of having pay and conditions on these vessels regulated under Australian law now rests with the unions' High Court challenge to a Work Choices regulation.
