Discrimination and equity page 27 of 88

The ACTU's bid for 10 days paid family and domestic violence leave has been bolstered by new FWC-commissioned research indicating that a third of recent agreements have a paid entitlement and half of those deals provide at least the quantum the peak body is seeking.

As artificial intelligence-based systems for recruitment and selection of employees have moved from the "periphery" to "centre stage" in the past decade, their largely unregulated and poorly understood use has given rise to transparency issues and discrimination risks, according to a leading IR academic.

A plumbing company has been ordered to pay $50,000 to a Maori truck driver regularly racially abused by a co-director, a judge however rejecting that being called a "sheep shagger" formed part of the discrimination.

The Attorney-General's Department will open a consultation process in December on six of the outstanding recommendations in Sex Discrimination Commissioner Kate Jenkins' landmark Respect@Work report, but the Opposition says the timeline leaves no room for legislation ahead of the federal election, expected by May.

A former ETU official is suing over his expulsion from the union for credit card misuse and refusing to apologise for an alleged assault, claiming discrimination on the basis of his gambling addiction and that the matters had already been finalised under the branch's previous leadership.

The Federal Court has given a self-represented worker a chance re-plead a race discrimination case against CIMIC Group subsidiary UGL after painstaking analysis of his "discursive" statements of claim led to the bulk being struck out or summarily dismissed.

The FWC has pushed back hearings for the ACTU's bid for 10 days paid family and domestic violence leave from next month to late February next year.

SafeWork NSW has charged Qantas over alleged discriminatory conduct against an OHS representative it stood down after he apparently advised colleagues not to clean planes arriving from China early last year due to COVID-19 concerns.

A recruitment company's former operations manager, who is claiming $20,000 for the hurt and humiliation flowing from her alleged discriminatory sacking due to her pregnancy, has won more time to pursue her claim, while her employer has failed in its bid for costs against her "neophyte" lawyer, after a court accepted that there had been "a comedy of errors" that fell well short of representative error.

The FWC has today launched a consultation process for its new anti-s-xual-harassment jurisdiction, which starts operating from November 11, while it has also published a benchbook on the regime.