A full Federal Court majority has today rejected a judge's reasoning for ordering the MUA to pay a fine of just $38,000 for a week-long unlawful strike at Hutchison Ports' Sydney and Brisbane container terminals, but has rebuffed the FWO's contention that the stevedore should have been awarded $600,000 in damages it didn't seek.
The FWC has held that an agreement negotiated with two train drivers but set to cover an entire transferred workforce on the Roy Hill Pilbara mine network was not genuinely agreed, but it is asking whether this is a minor error that can be dealt with via an undertaking, "odd as that may be".
The Federal Court has ordered a construction company to reinstate an electrician until it decides whether it took adverse action by sacking him within 10 days of his becoming a health and safety representative and reporting suspected asbestos in a water tunnel.
Leading employment law academics have urged a WA inquiry to consider a growing body of evidence that wage theft is "not so much an anomaly, as a norm", while the AiG says that characterising under-payments as stealing is misleading.
The FWC has used new legislation permitting it to overlook minor technical or procedural errors in agreements to endorse an enterprise deal with a bargaining notice that failed to comply with the Act's pre-approval requirements.
Labor has pledged to immediately increase the minimum wage for skilled overseas visa workers to $65,000 - a rise of almost 21% - if it wins the Federal election
The AFP told two senior Coalition ministers that providing witness statements would "significantly assist" its investigation into media leaks about pending raids on the AWU in 2017.
The AWU claims to have arrested its membership losses, with a new back-office system recording a "modest" increase in numbers, but the ROC is growing impatient, accusing the union of lacking urgency and transparency in rectifying its reporting after it first raised issues about inaccurate data more than two-and-a-half years ago.
James Cook University is fighting back against a Federal Circuit Court finding that it unlawfully sacked an academic who criticised prominent climate research, while the NTEU has welcomed a finding that the institution's code of conduct is "subordinate" to an intellectual freedom clause in its agreement.
A full Federal Court has upheld a finding that agreement-sanctioned union stopwork meetings can be freely used to delay and disrupt business as part of a campaign strategy, but has increased fines for the CFMMEU's coercion of head contractor Hutchison by almost 30%.
