After chairing negotiations between resources giant Esso and the AWU, long-serving FWC member Bernie Riordan has today issued a recommendation that the company provide a 22% pay rise over almost four years to end a decade-long deadlock for its Bass Strait platform operators and that in return the workforce move to a new roster.
The CPSU is recommending the Albanese Government's "bolstered" final pay offer to its members, after winning an additional lump sum payment that brings the first year's 4% increase forward by 12 weeks.
The Minns Labor Government has introduced IR changes that "remove the power to cap wages for good" and replace it with a "mutual gains bargaining" system, while also boosting the NSW IRC's powers and restoring it as an integrated court and tribunal.
Award wage increases have responded to rather than contributed to higher price inflation, and although the tight labour market has brought higher pay growth, it is "not enough to be a threat to slowing price inflation", according to a leading labour market economist.
ANZ's plan to "force" workers to return to the office for half of the working week is "short-sighted", "antiquated" and "punitive", according to the Finance Sector Union, which is also urging members at the RBA to reject a second unilateral bargaining offer.
A FWC full bench has refused to extend a farm's 16-year-old deal for 12 weeks beyond next month's sunsetting of zombie agreements, describing the application as an effort to pay below-award rates for "one more" onion-picking season.
University research commissioned by the FWC has identified 29 "large, highly feminised" and probably undervalued occupations covered by 13 modern awards that it might spotlight in the current annual wage review, in response to the Secure Jobs' imperative to address unequal remuneration and gender undervaluation in minimum rates of pay.
A judge has declined to bundle together an employer's various workplace breaches in ordering it to pay $163,000 in fines to a former worker for stripping his severance pay of more than 500 accumulated annual leave hours.
