Stevedoring productivity declined in the last quarter of 1999, with poor performances in Sydney and Melbourne dragging down the national average for container lifts to just 19 an hour, only marginally better than before the 1998 waterfront dispute.
Some 70,000 New South Wales public school and TAFE teachers have rejected the Government's pay offer and plan a campaign of industrial action, while their 10,000 Catholic school colleagues have accepted the Government's offer of a 16% pay increase, but without key tradeoffs sought in the public system.
The long-running bargaining dispute at ACI's Box Hill mould manufacturing plant spread nationally this week, with workers at the company's plants around the country staging a 24-hour support strike on Wednesday.
A five-member full bench of the High Court has reserved its decision on another Rio Tinto versus CFMEU (mining and energy division) case that deals with the crucial issue of the Federal Court's entitlement to interfere with IRC decisions but has little significance on the ground.
Queensland Workplace Agreements under the Beattie Government's IR regime have a far higher incidence of linkage to award wage increases than AWAs and WA Workplace Agreements, according to a new study.
The crucial issue of whether awards and agreements carry over when work is outsourced is to be determined by a full bench of the High Court, after the Court this morning granted a chemist special leave to appeal an earlier Federal Court ruling.
The ACTU has defended its claim that union members earn substantially more than non-members, despite a National Institute of Labor Studies (NILS) finding that the difference arises mainly because of low membership rates among part-time workers.
In another blow against outsourcing, the Community and Public Sector Union has won a Federal Court ruling that employees transferred from the former CES to Employment National are entitled to the wages and conditions provided under the awards and agreements applying to the former agency.
