Queensland Council of Unions secretary Jacqueline King says Workplace Relations Minister Tony Burke is "receptive" to calls for new gender equity laws replicating the State's legislation that has "made more of a difference" in its first year than in the previous two decades under the Queensland IRC's equal remuneration principle.
The Nobel Prize for economic sciences has been awarded to a Harvard professor who has a penchant for historical detective work, digging into gender differences in labour markets that stretch back to the eighteenth century.
The NTEU is calling for urgent change, after its latest survey found that "s-xual harassment, s-xism, and gender-based bias in tertiary education workplaces continues to be largely ignored and as a result remains firmly entrenched in our universities".
In what is believed to be the first workplace breastfeeding discrimination ruling, a tribunal has found that a KFC franchisee indirectly discriminated against a worker when it told her to express milk in a tent, within a storeroom with no door.
Employers can comply with the new "positive duty" to eliminate sexual harassment and sex discrimination by fostering a respectful culture, ensuring workers have avenues to report incidents, and taking a "risk-based" approach to prevention, according to Human Rights Commission guidance.
Mandating equality bargaining and creating an enforceable positive gender equality duty could improve workplace gender equality, academics say in a new article in the Journal of IR.
Former Prime Minister Julia Gillard has unveiled a statue commemorating the landmark 1969 equal pay protest by trade union activist and feminist Zelda D'Aprano, who chained herself to the door of the Commonwealth building in Melbourne.
A former chef at a major catering company has appeared before FWC President Adam Hatcher seeking an equal remuneration order, in a case that could test workers' ability to seek retrospective redress from a pay equity expert panel once they have left an employer.
