The Fair Work Commission has ordered BlueScope Steel to consult with a group of maintenance workers at its Port Kembla steelworks, after finding it failed to comply with the terms of a landmark 2015 enterprise agreement that reduced wages and reformed work practices to keep the plant open.
The FWC has rejected an employer's jurisdictional objections to hearing the dismissal appeal of an employee over the high-income cap who worked on overseas assignments, finding that while he fell outside the enterprise agreement he was covered by the industry award.
An FWC full bench has highlighted the limits of permissible ex parte communication between parties to agreements and tribunal members, in a ruling in which it found that such exchanges denied procedural fairness to the union objecting to a deal's approval.
The FWC has approved a new agreement that permits poultry giant Inghams to suspend workers without pay for up to three days during investigations into misconduct, after it found any detriment when compared with the award is outweighed by the deal's benefits.
As a court fines a regional café more than $500,000 for exploiting overseas workers and the FWO pursues two other cafes for unlawful "cash-back" schemes, Ombudsman Natalie James has welcomed the Federal Government's commitment to introducing laws to prohibit such arrangements.
The NSW Public Service Association has defied a court order restraining it from organising its members to strike in protest at the State Government's plans to privatise disability support work and will now face substantial penalties in the Supreme Court.
AMMA has asked an FWC presidential member to correct the public record, claiming he was wrong in upbraiding the employer body for its "apparent failure" to inform the Commission about changes to its client's ownership during a good faith bargaining case.
Mining giant Thiess has had a proposed enterprise agreement knocked back because it was not genuinely agreed, with the FWC finding the company chose the three employees who participated in the ballot to "manipulate" the result.
Onshore workers for Esso's Bass Strait oil and gas operations have voted up a second replacement enterprise agreement, leaving only the terms of the third deal, for offshore, to be arbitrated by the FWC.
FWC President Iain Ross has asked a full bench to review abandonment of employment clauses in six modern awards after a recent ruling that employers must take the "additional step" of ending the employment relationship when a worker walks off the job.
