The meatworkers' union has released an explosive "black market labour investigation" that accuses a meat processing company, a regional local government authority and labour suppliers of working together to exploit temporary migrants on working holiday visas rather than employ locals.
The husband and wife team behind a cleaning business have been hit with a record $510,840 penalty for underpaying three Taiwanese working holiday visa holders $11,500, a Federal Circuit Court judge dismissing concerns about their ability to pay despite an outstanding bill of $343,000 from a previous prosecution for identical contraventions.
United Voice is today staging a protest outside a Melbourne restaurant at the centre of a bartender's underpayments claim and says its investigation of the state's hospitality sector exposes the city as the "wage theft capital of Australia".
In a ruling that underlines the Fair Work Ombudsman's pursuit of accessorial liability against advisors, a court has for the first time imposed a fine on an accountancy firm involved in an employer's underpayments.
After entering into an FWO compliance partnership that commits it to taking responsibility for underpayments across its trolley collection network for the past three years, Woolworths says it would welcome working with any regulatory body to ensure workers in all supply chains are paid correctly.
In the FWO's first underpayment prosecution relying on race discrimination prohibitions in the Fair Work Act, a court has found a Tasmanian hotel and its manager deliberately short-changed a head chef and kitchen hand and expected them to work long hours, six days a week because of their Malaysian nationality and Chinese race.
A Federal Court class action against Chubb Insurance Australia Limited for alleged failing to pay minimum rates, overtime and penalties has been discontinued after the lawyers for the employees failed to secure litigation funding.
The Fair Work Ombudsman has flagged that it is likely to take legal action over alleged underpayments at Caltex service stations that are run by franchisees.
Citizens of nine of the Pacific's most vulnerable island nations and Timor-Leste will soon be able to work in the aged care sector in regional Australia following a Federal Government decision to establish a new Pacific Labour Scheme alongside the existing Seasonal Worker Programme.
A court has found a husband and wife who performed largely home-based clerical work exclusively for one business before their services were further outsourced were employees rather than contractors because the company had an "undoubted authority to control" the relationship.
