Unions are threatening to walk off jobs that risk the safety of essential workers, after what they claim is the Morrison Government's refusal to cooperate on the workplace response to the Omicron strain of COVID-19 and amid a continuing dire shortage of one of the "basic" frontline tools - Rapid Antigen Tests.
Workers across a range of critical industries will be permitted to attend work despite being close contacts of a COVID-19 case, once they receive a negative rapid antigen test result, following a national cabinet decision today, according to Prime Minister Scott Morrison.
The FWC has declined to extend time for an unvaccinated worker who claimed he lodged his claim late because of the theft of 45 one-kilogram silver bars from his home, while it has upheld a nursing home's sacking of a maintenance manager who failed to comply with a State Government inoculation mandate.
The FWC has distinguished between "regular" industrial protests and those likely to attract "public outrage" during pandemic restrictions in finding a crane company entitled to sack an operator who attended a violent anti-vax rally outside CFMMEU offices in Melbourne.
A senior FWC member has invited "relevant authorities" to investigate a potentially fraudulent COVID-19 vaccination certificate supplied to an employer by a worker claiming to have been unlawfully stood down.
BHP says it will ask 35 Mt Arthur coal mine workers why it should not sack them if they continue to defy its vaccination mandate after engaging in a fresh FWC-assisted consultation process.
The Federal Court has today refused the TWU's bid for reinstatement of some 2000 ground-handling workers who had their jobs outsourced by the airline at the height of the coronavirus pandemic.
Fair Work Commission President Iain Ross told IR Minister Michaelia Cash that if Deputy President Lyndall Dean repeated her misconduct when she made contentious anti-vaccination comments in a September decision, it would be time to consider removing her from office.
In a sign of the continuing uncertainty surrounding COVID-19's impact on workplaces, the FWC will consider extending millions of award-covered employees' entitlement to two weeks unpaid "pandemic leave" to the end of June next year.
