The FWC is not acting beyond its powers when it allows extra time for compulsory conciliation meetings when setting protection action ballot deadlines, a full bench has concluded.
The FWC has panned rail operator Qube for "reneging" on an in-principle enterprise deal with the RTBU, after rejecting the union's bid to terminate industrial action that allegedly presented a threat to community safety and welfare.
The FWC has cleared the way for RAFFWU to ballot its Woolworths members on whether to take multiple forms of industrial action and will require the supermarket giant to attend a conciliation conference next Wednesday in what the unregistered union says is a "historic" win.
NTEU members have resolved to hit seven Victorian universities with industrial action targeting their open days, including one institution that failed to convince the FWC not to grant the union a protected action ballot order.
In the latest of a rash of significant rulings on protected action ballots, the FWC's national practice leader for bargaining has insisted a bus company provide employee details despite its "uncommon concession" to rely on a union's database alone to develop a roll of voters.
Virgin's groundbreaking bid for an intractable bargaining declaration is "the quintessential bargaining scenario which the Parliament would have had in mind when enacting the IBD regime", it claims, while the FWC has allowed the ACTU to intervene in the case.
The FWC decided this week to terminate rather than suspend industrial action at the Australian Rail Track Authority, because the parties' "entrenched" positions made it "unlikely any significant progress would be made" if it ordered a pause, according to newly-released reasons.
The FWC has found no justification for interfering with a union's "statutory right" to three working days notice of industrial action against an "essential service" energy provider, after taking into account a five-point "safety commitment" the ETU put forward in response to the employer's concerns about supply continuity.
The FWC has refused to suspend engineers' industrial action at a Virgin Australia subsidiary while their employer pursues an intractable bargaining declaration, in an early test of the new Secure Jobs provision.
Resources giant Santos has been ordered to pay $65,000 to a worker sacked for telling a contractor to "take a sickie" during a strike, the FWC finding the dismissal harsh after weighing his long and unblemished career.
