The Productivity Commission's leadership and human resources teams will undergo training in trauma-informed, victim-centred responses, as part of a suite of "significant" changes for the advisory body, after staff told an independent review that HR is a "black box" offering limited insight into actions to address complaints of inappropriate workplace behaviours.
Lawyers from the Redfern Legal Centre and Human Rights Law Centre are looking for s-xual harassment lawyers and industrial officers to complete surveys on the use of non-disclosure agreements in settling s-xual harassment claims, as part of a Sydney University program.
Federal Parliament has passed a trio of bills that establish the Parliamentary Workplace Support Service as an independent statutory HR agency and overhaul employment arrangements for parliamentary staff.
Employers can comply with the new "positive duty" to eliminate sexual harassment and sex discrimination by fostering a respectful culture, ensuring workers have avenues to report incidents, and taking a "risk-based" approach to prevention, according to Human Rights Commission guidance.
Mandating equality bargaining and creating an enforceable positive gender equality duty could improve workplace gender equality, academics say in a new article in the Journal of IR.
A judge has thrown out a Bing Lee worker's race and sex discrimination case, saying it demonstrates "the perils of litigating hurt feelings", after she embellished events "which stem predominantly from unremarkable, collegiate 'small talk', and petty workplace disagreements to cast them in a more nefarious light".
A female Qantas pilot suing the airline for alleged gender discrimination and s-xual harassment must re-plead her case after a court found her claim that the workplace was "hostile to women" to be "unsatisfactorily imprecise".
The looming enforcement of a positive duty on employers to prevent s-xual discrimination and harassment will require responsible "bystander interaction" as well as workplace leadership, according to the president of the Australian Human Rights Commission.
A UK tribunal has found that a male manager harassed a male worker by touching him inappropriately and suggestively singing a song about propositioning someone for s-x.
