The Federal Court has applied the "precautionary principle" in accepting the FWO's view on the process for calculating underpayments for 19,000 salaried Woolworths employees, while it has also indicated that jointly managing the matter with a similar Coles case "would be useful".
The aircraft engineers union says no employers should require proof of COVID-19 inoculations that include individual healthcare identifiers, with Virgin agreeing in consent orders to delete the material amid concerns they could be used to access medical histories for other purposes.
The FWO alleges in court proceedings filed yesterday that Coles owes its managers about $100 million more than it has made allowance for following internal payroll audits looking at the underpayments.
The FWO has begun prosecuting retailer Woolworths for allegedly substantially underpaying salaried managers who had been subject to annualised salaries.
Two franchisee directors of a Chatime bubble tea store have had most of their underpayment penalties suspended after a court accepted they acted on their franchisor's advice that they could pay age-based flat rates.
A judge who took exception to a business being liquidated during an underpayment case was entitled to impose heavier penalties on the owners than sought by the FWO, an appeal court has found.
In a significant ruling clarifying how penalties for multiple contraventions should be assessed, a full Federal Court has in cutting by more than half a $445,000 fine imposed on the CEPU rejected a judge's "global" approach to the historic reporting breaches.
The AWU is seeking to delete a decade-old pieceworker provision in the horticulture award that it claims leaves affected workers with no safety net and substandard rates of pay.
A new McKell Institute report recommends that the Morrison Government implement a national labour-hire licensing scheme, remove entry barriers to enable inspections by unions and redesign the visa system to curb widespread exploitation and wage theft in fruit-picking.
