Federal Parliament has passed a trio of bills that establish the Parliamentary Workplace Support Service as an independent statutory HR agency and overhaul employment arrangements for parliamentary staff.
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.
A judge has thrown out a Bing Lee worker's race and sex discrimination case, saying it demonstrates "the perils of litigating hurt feelings", after she embellished events "which stem predominantly from unremarkable, collegiate 'small talk', and petty workplace disagreements to cast them in a more nefarious light".
A female Qantas pilot suing the airline for alleged gender discrimination and s-xual harassment must re-plead her case after a court found her claim that the workplace was "hostile to women" to be "unsatisfactorily imprecise".
The looming enforcement of a positive duty on employers to prevent s-xual discrimination and harassment will require responsible "bystander interaction" as well as workplace leadership, according to the president of the Australian Human Rights Commission.
A UK tribunal has found that a male manager harassed a male worker by touching him inappropriately and suggestively singing a song about propositioning someone for s-x.
Workers s-xually harassed before the Secure Jobs, Better Pay changes came into effect in March will have to choose whether to omit complaints for conduct that occurred before that time to use the new provisions, or "make a potentially less advantageous application" using the old provisions, according to an employment law expert.
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.