In a significant blow to ABCC attempts to rein in the behaviour of union officials by holding them personally liable for breach fines, the Federal Court has today ruled that an offender's past record must be taken into account before imposing such conditions.
The Fair Work Commission has rejected a push to give employers more scope to refuse requests by casual workers to convert to full-time and part-time work.
Five migrant fruit pickers at the centre of a $10 million Federal Court claim against a labour hire company and its owners are seeking to be recognised as casuals, alleging their contracts for piecework were invalid and based average take home pay on an unrealistic workload.
The AWU's Hair Stylists Australia has deployed its first paid organiser to tackle the "widespread cultural problem" of underpayments as the FWO pursues another hairdressing industry scalp on behalf of a teenage apprentice short-changed $14,500.
In a ruling criticising the practice of diplomats recruiting domestic workers from overseas, the FWC has ordered Iraq's consul-general to pay $20,000 to a Filipina live-in nanny dismissed after raising concerns about her entitlements.
The union leading the campaign against prospective job losses at a major brewery is at risk of being sidelined after the FWC found it "reached the line between [unacceptably careless disregard] and. . . deliberate non-compliance" in failing to communicate restraining notices to members.
The FWC has confirmed the right of employers in safety-critical industries to dismiss workers whose out-of-hours conduct impairs the safe performance of their duties, in the case of a flight attendant who called in sick during a layover after being hospitalised with a blood-alcohol reading of .205.
Unilever has successfully challenged a requirement to count employees' prior periods of casual and seasonal work when calculating length of service for redundancy payouts, an FWC full bench calling into question a landmark 2016 majority finding that casual work should be included.
