The High Court has reserved its decision on parallel appeals by Esso and the AWU questioning what constitutes a breach of bargaining orders and whether a breach during bargaining means future protected action is not possible.
A full Federal Court has fined the CFMEU $300,000 and the CEPU $130,000 over a 2011 industrial campaign; penalties that are almost three times higher than originally sought by the construction watchdog.
The FWC has temporarily restrained a union from taking industrial action after accepting it was not genuinely seeking an agreement when a delegate made the "somewhat unusual" suggestion that the company shift its workers to a labour supply or contracting arrangement managed by him.
An Esso contractor has today won a court order to ban unions from using their giant inflatable rat, known as Scabby, from a picket outside the oil giant's Longford processing plant in Gippsland.
Workers at a Victorian timber mill have voted up an enterprise agreement they turned down last month, ending a bitter 10-week lockout the Victorian Government had been seeking to terminate.
A casual pizza delivery worker who lost a "driver of the year" competition has failed in her bid to overturn the result and pocket $15,000 prize money after the FWC found it would be a "bizarre and entirely inappropriate outcome" and that in any case it had no power to hear the case.
Victorian CFMEU secretary John Setka has issued a guarded apology for comments at Tuesday's union rally in Melbourne, saying that the thought of going to ABCC inspectors' homes to "expose" the work they did was "reprehensible".
