Despite affecting less than 1% of its workforce, the operator of Melbourne's Yarra Trams network has been told by the FWC to hold off on further changes to its supply chain area in order to comply with an agreement's consultation obligations concerning "significant effects".
The FWC has recommended that an employer release an AWU delegate an hour early to catch a flight to the union's annual women's conference, finding it not unreasonable under the terms of its agreement to refuse her a full day off during sugarcane crushing season.
As the SDA prepares to take a proposed deal to Woolworths workers, its rival union is backing a store supervisor's application to terminate the retailer's 2012 national agreement and claw back $1 billion in alleged underpayments.
Employers are warning of "massive liability" and instability for all who engage casuals and unions say it could be harder to use labour hire to "drive down costs", after a full Federal Court upheld a finding that a labour hire casual was in fact an employee entitled to annual leave payments.
A company that relied on an FWC online calculator to notify workers of a ballot has had the resulting agreement thrown out for failing to provide the statutory seven-day access period, prompting a senior Commission member to lament his inability to "overcome what is clearly a procedural failure".
The CFMMEU has begun Federal Court action that seeks to hold John Holland and CPB Contracting vicariously liable for subcontractors' alleged underpayment of wages and entitlements on Canberra's light rail project, with the union seeking to recover $700,000 and impose penalties.
An FWC full bench has quashed a finding that BHP Coal should have kept paying or considered alternative duties for a mineworker while his driving licence was suspended, saying it would be tantamount to requiring an employer to excuse from duties but pay workers who turned up drunk.
The Federal Court has upheld Qantas' right to refuse access to documents sought over a "leave burn" program for aircraft engineers, in a decision a union leader says raises the bar for entering workplaces to prove breaches.
The FWO has launched a challenge to last month's Federal Court order for the MUA to pay a $38,000 fine for a single contravention of the prohibition on unlawful strikes, when the watchdog was seeking $3.6 million for what it says was more than 500 breaches during industrial action against stevedore Hutchison Ports.