Prime Minister Scott Morrison's headland speech on a new approach to IR change extended an olive branch to unions by dropping the "ensuring integrity' legislation, but also raised the prospect of further measures to crack down on unlawful behaviour on construction sites.
The ACTU will head into the Morrison Government's JobMaker policy discussions with the aim of reducing insecure employment and extending paid pandemic leave.
Industrial Relations Minister Christian Porter will chair five working groups with the aim of producing a "practical reform" of the IR system to help grow jobs as the economy emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic.
In a significant decision examining how employers can lawfully assess "useful work" when standing down employees, the FWC has ruled a pandemic-affected cruise operator acted "upon proper principles" when transferring some of a superintendent's duties to others.
Thirteen major law firms have dropped their application for temporary changes to the Legal Services Award in response to the coronavirus, a month after the ASU demanded they prove the changes were necessary.
The FWC has found it unreasonable of Qantas to only pay the equivalent of two fortnightly JobKeeper payments to a monthly paid manager who worked for part of the period, in a decision the ASU wants applied to the rest of its workforce.
The Federal Court has issued orders that the administrators of Virgin Australia will not be personally liable for any debts to the Commonwealth incurred through the JobKeeper wage subsidy scheme.
Qantas has failed in its challenge to FWC powers to review how it applied the JobKeeper scheme to a worker claiming he was short-changed, a full bench finding among other reasons that the airline's characterisation of the dispute was "somewhat artificial".
In a matter a judge has speculated could have "wide ramifications" regarding stand-downs, Qantas and Jetstar have won an injunction stopping the FWC from arbitrating a dispute concerning hundreds of engineers rendered idle by the pandemic.
More than 200,000 award-covered fast food industry workers face temporary cuts to part-time hours and reduced overtime penalties under fiercely-contested, pandemic-related changes approved by an FWC full bench.
