The AWU expects employees at Esso Australia's Bass Strait oil operations to reject the company's proposed new enterprise agreements, which include shifting from seven-day to 14-day roster cycles for offshore workers.
CPSU members in 17 APS agencies are set to begin a campaign of rolling four-hour stoppages next month, as the union seeks to pressure the federal government to increase its sub-inflation pay offers.
The Federal Court has reserved its decision in a case in which Esso Australia argues that members of the AWU took unprotected industrial action, which cut its oil and gas production in Bass Strait in March and April.
The licenced aircraft engineers' union is urging the "liberalisation" of union coverage rules, saying that if they didn't exist at all, the industrial unrest that fuelled the bargaining battle between the union and Qantas might have been diminished before the airline dramatically shut down its operations and locked out its workforce in 2011.
The head of Networks NSW, which owns the power "poles and wires" entities that are to be privatised if the Coalition wins Saturday's NSW election, is pushing for FWC approval of agreements to be conditional on them undergoing an objective "productivity test" and is backing calls for the creation of a separate FWC appeals jurisdiction.
The Fair Work Act's provisions for ending safety-threatening industrial action are broader than those of its predecessor, a senior FWC member has ruled in her reasons for suspending planned NSW power industry stoppages earlier this month.
A group of leading IR academics has made a preemptive strike against any attempt to use the Coalition's "freedoms" inquiry to diminish the immunity from common law liability conferred by the Fair Work Act's protected industrial action provisions.
A senior FWC full bench has moved to clarify the confusion caused by conflicting decisions on whether unions that bargain for non-permitted matters are "genuinely trying to reach an agreement" under the Fair Work Act.
