A five-member full bench of the High Court has reserved its decision on another Rio Tinto versus CFMEU (mining and energy division) case that deals with the crucial issue of the Federal Court's entitlement to interfere with IRC decisions but has little significance on the ground.
Queensland Workplace Agreements under the Beattie Government's IR regime have a far higher incidence of linkage to award wage increases than AWAs and WA Workplace Agreements, according to a new study.
The crucial issue of whether awards and agreements carry over when work is outsourced is to be determined by a full bench of the High Court, after the Court this morning granted a chemist special leave to appeal an earlier Federal Court ruling.
The ACTU has defended its claim that union members earn substantially more than non-members, despite a National Institute of Labor Studies (NILS) finding that the difference arises mainly because of low membership rates among part-time workers.
In another blow against outsourcing, the Community and Public Sector Union has won a Federal Court ruling that employees transferred from the former CES to Employment National are entitled to the wages and conditions provided under the awards and agreements applying to the former agency.
An IRC full bench has introduced new award shift penalty arrangements to curtail deliberate tailoring of work patterns by employers to avoid paying penalty rates.
The CFMEU has failed in its attempt to gain access to Workplace Relations Minister Peter Reith's letter to Prime Minister John Howard about the Federation Square project in Melbourne.
