The Federal Court has imposed record fines totalling more than $2.4 million against the CFMEU national and NSW branches and nine officials over breaches at Barangaroo in 2014, but says that without "legislative action" even higher penalties currently available under the law might not deter the militant union.
A CFMEU-backed class action brought against an employer for allegedly underpaying 150 workers more than $1 million for travel time stands to recast agreement wording on the precise location where a job begins and ends.
In the first test of whether Queensland's laws regulating peaceful assemblies can be used to block pickets and protests during industrial disputes, the state's Supreme Court has rejected mining company Glencore's argument that such activities can't be authorised.
Tasmanian independent MP Andrew Wilkie today introduced a private members' bill to prevent the Fair Work Commission from agreeing to employer requests to terminate expired enterprise agreements that leave workers worse off.
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.
The FWC looks set to reduce by a week its hearings into an application by Coles nightfill worker Penny Vickers to terminate the 2011 agreement, after warning that granting further extensions could render her case moot if the retailer gets a new agreement approved.
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.
A cleaner who invoiced as both a sole trader and a company but claims he was an employee is pursuing Woolworths and three contracting businesses for more than $300,000 in underpaid wages and unpaid overtime, annual leave and superannuation he says he should have been paid between 2004 and 2015.
The FWC has accepted that BHP Billiton's sacking of a worker who raised his safety visor to get a better look at an exploding smelter at a uranium mine was justified but harsh, stopping short of reinstatement, though, because of the company's "rational" loss of trust and confidence in him.
