Shadow IR Minister, Stephen Smith, today said the Senate was doing on IR what it did with the Telstra sale - acting as a "rubber stamp" for the Government.
Employers should be preparing their management strategies now for workplace absence rates as high as 50% if a bird flu pandemic occurs in Australia, according to leading researchers and academics at an Australian Industry Group conference this morning.
The Work Choices legislation is so flawed that any amendments would "only marginally mitigated the intended and unintended consequences", according to the report on the bill by Opposition senators.
Coalition senators have, as expected, proposed changes around the edges only to the sweeping Work Choices bill. Their report makes just one recommendation - that the Senate pass the legislation - but it states that the committee "would like" the Government to consider amendments on the 38-hour week averaging provisions, the 90-day notice period for terminating agreements, the prohibited matter rules for pre-reform agreements, outworker protection, the federal trainee/apprentice provisions, and guaranteeing four weeks annual leave.
With the Senate committee report on the Federal Government's Work Choices legislation due to be tabled at 1pm today, Family First Senator Steve Fielding has reiterated his objections to the legislation, and produced a list of his own amendments.
A Federal Court judge has reinstated an electrician and CEPU delegate sacked last month from ACI's Spotswood plant in Melbourne shortly after organising a stop work meeting to discuss the use of subcontractors at the site.
The International Labour Organisation has upheld an ACTU complaint that the Building and Construction Industry Improvement Act breaches ILO Conventions 87 and 98 on freedom of association and collective bargaining.
The AIRC has defied the Howard Government by deciding to proceed on a "provisional" basis with the ACTU's national wage case application for a 4% increase in federal award rates.
The Howard Government could achieve a simpler and more comprehensive national IR system by broadening the constitutional basis of workplace laws beyond the corporations power, including restructuring the AIRC to jettison the negative legacy of its constitutional underpinnings while retaining the positive aspects, according to Victorian academics.
The Work Choices provisions allowing employers to require medical certificates for any period of illness will have even wider application than many practitioners believe, DEWR evidence in the IR Senate inquiry today confirmed.
