Protracted negotiations over oil and gas agreements in the Bass Strait have moved a step closer to arbitration following the Victorian Government's application to terminate bargaining in the face of looming strike action.
The CFMEU's mining and energy division has flagged that its members will take protected industrial action at Victoria's Loy Yang power station within the next month.
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.
The Federal Court has refused to suspend penalties against 50 workers who walked out to protest a colleague's sacking, fining each individual up to $1,500 for their unlawful industrial action at ExxonMobil's Longford gas conditioning plant last year.
NSW Government electricity distributor Essential Energy will be able to proceed with up to 600 forced redundancies over the next 18 months, under a workplace determination made by an FWC full bench today.
The Fair Work Commission has issued a three week stop order preventing workers at a South Australian logistics provider from engaging in unlawful industrial action in support of a worker it allegedly sacked for taking too much time off work after a cancer diagnosis.
The FWC will next week move towards making a workplace determination for the Department of Immigration and Border Protection after employees this week voted overwhelmingly to reject the department's third bargaining offer.
More than 50 construction workers are facing penalties after the Federal Court found they took unlawful strike action when they attended a CFMEU rally at a Perth children's hospital construction site in 2013, but the union says the case is a complete "farce".
The Victorian Supreme Court took the "serious step" of imposing a representative order on individuals involved in an unlawful blockade at a Geelong oil refinery early this month, but extending it to encompass future participants would go beyond the terms of any previous such order, according to the judge in the case.