In a rare decision on stand-down provisions under the Fair Work Act, the Federal Court has ruled that a contractor failed to comply with its obligation to pay its permanent part-time school cleaners normally during the 16 weeks of school holidays.
The FWC has confirmed it has the power to determine a dispute between labour supplier WorkPac and the CFMEU over pay cuts at a Rio Tinto coal mine, but its intervention is conditional on the union naming the employees involved.
Victoria's police federation has lost a battle to secure overtime for officers working at the 2014 G20 leaders' summit in Brisbane after the FWC concluded they were not working in the six hours between checking out of their hotel and a bus arriving to take them to their homebound flights.
The RTBU is challenging the FWC's refusal to determine a dispute over a proposed restructure by Pacific National, claiming a "burdensome requirement" to name individual members involved threatens to "corrode" union power.
A full Federal Court majority has clarified that employers can deduct employees' annual and personal/carer's leave that falls on public holidays if the employee is covered by an enterprise agreement that provides more generous entitlements than the NES.
An FWC full bench has highlighted the limits of permissible ex parte communication between parties to agreements and tribunal members, in a ruling in which it found that such exchanges denied procedural fairness to the union objecting to a deal's approval.
Mining giant Thiess has had a proposed enterprise agreement knocked back because it was not genuinely agreed, with the FWC finding the company chose the three employees who participated in the ballot to "manipulate" the result.
An employer that made seven of its employees redundant without properly considering "job swaps" with others breached its statutory obligation to explore redeployment options, an FWC full bench has found.
Anglo Coal is facing a seven-figure backpayment, after the High Court refused to grant it special leave to appeal a finding that a subsidiary breached its enterprise agreement by failing to pay employees correctly when they cashed-out personal/carer's leave.
A Senate inquiry has urged Public Service Minister Michaelia Cash to intervene in the federal public sector bargaining dispute and soften the "intransigent" Coalition's "brutally hard-line" bargaining policy by relaxing the 2% wages cap and removing the prohibition on backpay, but Government senators have flatly rejected the recommendations.
